The Deputy Prime Minister of
Swaziland / eSwatini Themba Masuku has said poor people should stop having
children because the kingdom cannot afford to support them.
The DPM’s office is responsible
for child welfare among other issues.
Masuku told the Swaziland News,
an online newspaper, that the Swazi government could not fulfil its obligations
to the poor.
He told the newspaper, ‘The
major problem we face as a country is that eMaswati [Swazi people] are having
more and more children. Why do you have more children if you do not have the
resources to look after those children? You can marry 10 wives but make sure
all those wives are well looked after. Once we are able to manage the
population, we could be a rich state. The government does not have a policy
that talks about orphans.’
The Deputy Prime Minister, who
was not elected but appointed to his post by King Mswati III the absolute
monarch of Swaziland, said thousands of children in Swaziland were in need of
food aid and other basic necessities of life and government had no financial
muscle to meet their everyday needs.
The Swaziland News
quoted him saying, ‘We have thousands of needy children today. The sad thing is
that the parents of these children are not all dead. Some are still alive and
poor, but they keep on producing more children every day. My advice to all
eMaswati is that they must have a reasonable number of children. You can have
one or two children. As long as you can love and maintain those children.’
According to figures in the CIA
Factbook there are about 374,000 children aged 14 or under in Swaziland. In
a report in August 2018 the World
Food Program said 45 percent of children in Swaziland were orphaned or
vulnerable. Chronic malnutrition was a main concern and stunting affected 26
percent of children under the age of five.
Seven in ten of the estimated 1.3 million population
live in abject poverty with incomes less than the equivalent of US$2 per day.
The global charity Oxfam named Swaziland as the most unequal country in the
world in a report
that detailed the differences in countries between the top most earners and
those at the bottom.
See also
Fraud
at Swazi Deputy PM’s office
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