There have been genuine achievements over these four decades: modest infrastructure has expanded, bilateral relations with Taiwan have benefited from increased agricultural expertise and pockets of the economy have grown. These are real achievements that should not be overlooked. However, an honest accounting of the 40-year reign ought to look beyond the ceremonial and ask real questions about governance, including whether most citizens are better off, freer, healthier, more educated or more secure than they were in 1986, when the monarch took office at 18.

If, on almost every meaningful measure, the answer is troubling, then what follows should not be seen as an attack on the person of the monarch but rather as an indictment of a governance system that has consistently chosen power over people. An economy that works for the few Eswatini’s economy tells a tale of two worlds, depending on who narrates it. At the very top, a narrow elite of businesspeople and politicians within the monarch’s inner circle controls most of the country’s wealth, while at the bottom, over 60% of the population lives below the poverty line.

These are not the natural outcomes of a small, landlocked country with limited resources; they are the predictable results of a deliberate policy environment that has persisted for the past four decades. Chief among these policy decisions is the treatment of Tibiyo Taka Ngwane, a sovereign wealth fund established in 1968 by the former monarch, King Sobhuza II. In its founding vision, the fund was intended to hold shares in the country’s major industries in trust for the Swazi nation, forming a genuine social security architecture built on the country’s productive assets.

Four decades later, that vision has been quietly hollowed out. The fund operates without parliamentary scrutiny, pays no tax and its benefits accrue not to a broad citizenry but to those at the very top of the political hierarchy. The late Mario Masuku, one of the country’s most enduring advocates for democracy, once described it as a “feedlot for the king and his inner circle.” What could have been the foundation of a genuine social security net, shielding ordinary Swazis from poverty and unemployment, instead became a vehicle for elite accumulation.

This pattern of monopolisation spans the economy, with major industries such as sugarcane farming, construction, media, and telecommunications dominated by entities closely tied to the ruling elites and their cronies. In the Lubombo region – the heart of Eswatini’s sugar belt and one of the country’s most significant sources of export revenue – this dynamic is most stark. Sugarcane has long been described as ‘Swazi gold’, yet the benefits of this gold elude the small farmers who live and work the land around the big corporations in the region.

The dual land tenure system, inherited from colonialism and never meaningfully reformed, divides the country between commercially productive Title Deed Land (TDL), where large-scale sugarcane, citrus and timber operations flourish, and the Swazi Nation Land (SNL), where the majority of the population attempts subsistence farming on plots allocated by chiefs, with no title, no security and often no realistic path to commercial agriculture. One farmer in Lubombo told international researchers that she could not even afford a tractor, let alone the joining fees and documentation required to join a sugar cooperative.

This is not an accident. The IMF has repeatedly recommended land tenure reform as a structural solution to Eswatini’s deepening economic inequality. The government has consistently declined to act because a system in which all SNL is held in trust by the monarch and allocated through chiefs who are instruments of royal authority is also a system of political control.

In Eswatini, land is not merely an economic resource; it is a political tool of governance and power. Reforming tenure would redistribute power. Equally, trade unions, which should provide workers with the only meaningful counterweight to this concentration of economic power, have been consistently suppressed.

While unions are formally permitted, obtaining and retaining legal status is deliberately made onerous and union leaders have repeatedly been targeted under the country’s broad sedition and terrorism laws. The environment for workers’ rights has never been allowed to develop into a genuine check on employers or the state. An education system left to wither No i