As Mswati III takes the chair of SADC’s Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation, the conditions that set Eswatini alight in June 2021 are quietly reassembling at home. This time, the class buffer that held the line is thinning.
29 September 2026
Substack
In July, a family homestead valued at E450,000 was reduced to rubble at KaNcesi in the north of the country. The following month, King Mswati III’s calendar took him to Kuala Lumpur on an official visit, straight from Durban, where Southern African heads of state had just elected him chairperson of SADC’s Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation.
These are not two isolated news pieces; they are one story, told from opposite ends of the same class structure. At one end, a household loses the one asset it could own, on land it never legally owned. At the other, a monarch whose allocation Parliament neither debates nor audits is entrusted with guarding peace and democratic governance across the region.
Four nations under one king
In my most recent reading, I came across the British economist Guy Standing, who gives us a vocabulary for this phenomenon. In his book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, he argues that the old working class has fractured into groups defined less by what they earn than by their relationship to work, income, and the state. At the bottom sits the precariat: people who labour without security, benefits, or an occupation that makes the future legible.
Standing calls them denizens rather than citizens, because the rights citizenship promises are quietly withdrawn from them. The term was popularised in migration studies by the Swedish political scientist Tomas Hammar, who used it for long-term residents who work, pay taxes and take part in local life but cannot vote or stand for national office: people living in between. In most countries, denizenship might be a metaphor. Still, in Eswatini, it is the constitutional order: political parties cannot contest elections, the king holds Swazi Nation Land (SNL) in trust, and no one living on it has guaranteed ownership.
Through Standing’s lens, I see Eswatini not as one nation but as four.
A. The proximate.
At the top sit the monarch, his family and those close enough to the throne to share its allocations. Their defining feature is not wealth but its source: income that flows from proximity rather than labour, through royal emoluments, the Tibiyo Taka Ngwane fund and the tender economy. Their security is total, but it is held at the pleasure of the monarch himself. That is why loyalty in Eswatini is performed so loudly; even the powerful are licensed, not free. Look at the extravagance of the so-called ‘national events’, where millions are presented to the monarch as gifts, locally known as tetfulo, which he spends as he wishes.
B. The salariat.
Below them are civil servants, chiefs’ structures, professionals and the managers of state-owned enterprises. They earn a wage and everything that surrounds it: a pension, medical aid, allowances, a career with a predictable next step. This class is the regime’s buffer. It has something to lose, and so it has historically held the line. They, in fact, lead the charge in the queue to submit tetfulo.
C. The precariat.
Then come those who work without any of that: textile workers, shop assistants, security guards, kombi crews, casual builders, farm dwellers, herders, and graduates cycling through short contracts. They live on the money wage alone.
Standing insists the precariat is a class in the making, not yet a class for itself, and that people enter it through different doors. Some fall in from working-class communities with little education and old fears, and are the most easily seduced by populists. Some are migrants who treat work as a means to an end and stay out of politics. And some are educated young people, sold schooling as a lottery ticket that loses value every year. Eswatini has all three: retrenched workers who hear the palace’s appeals to tradition as a promise to restore the old order; returnees and cross-border workers who keep their heads down; and the graduates on casual contracts who were at the heart of 2021. This group, Standing notes, draws in those the mainstream leaves out. In Eswatini, that means LGBTIQ+ people, women, human rights defenders, persons with disabilities, nonconformists and the communities the state would rather not see. Which faction the palace can still hold, and which it has already lost, is the real political map of the kingdom.
D. The unemployed.
Finally, some have no work at all. The 2025 Labour Force Survey puts unemployment at 33.5%, and only a third of working-age emaSwati have a job. The World Bank estimates that 25,000 young people enter the labour market each year to compete for roughly 1,000 new jobs.
My argument
Why separate the unemployed from the precariat? Elsewhere, the unemployed relate to the state through benefits. In Eswatini, they relate to it through nothing: the Unemployment Benefit Fund announced in the 2022 budget speech has yet to materialise. What catches them instead is the family homestead, on land occupied at someone else’s discretion.
That is the hinge of my argument. In Eswatini, the unemployment insurance system is a plot of land you hold with extreme uncertainty. Every demolition is therefore more than a housing story; it is the state repossessing the only safety net the unemployed may have left.
In A Precariat Charter, Standing calls such people supplicants: those who must ask for what others can claim as of right, so that their security depends on their deference. Eswatini has turned supplication into custom. Under kukhonta, a family obtains land on SNL by pledging allegiance to a chief, who answers to the king. When the only safety net runs through a pledge of loyalty, loyalty stops being a feeling and becomes a condition of survival.
These tiers are positions, not people. A single household routinely spans three of them: a nurse supporting a sister on one-month contracts and two cousins with no work at all. That is precisely what makes this moment dangerous.
At the top, Parliament has not scrutinised the royal allocation. April’s celebration of 40 years on the throne was, as Reuters reported, shadowed by criticism of royal luxury. Meanwhile, by the UN’s count, 58.9% of emaSwati live below the national poverty line.
In New York on 23 September, the king told the UN General Assembly that the true test of international cooperation is whether “a young person can find decent employment”. He asked the Secretary-General for help meeting development goals on a tight budget. Days later, the royal Airbus flew from New York’s JFK to Southwest Florida International Airport, according to flight-plan data posted by the US journalist Peter Busch, who then photographed it on the ground. Parliament will not be told what the trip cost. Standing counts anger among the precariat’s defining afflictions and traces it to a specific source: watching the winners. A generation still waiting for the decent work its king described in New York can now follow his aircraft on flight trackers.
Why I think the next rupture will be worse
The palace believes 2021 is behind it. The class structure says otherwise, for four reasons.
1. The buffer is thinning.
In 2021, the salaried class bent but did not break: the civil service kept working, and the security forces followed orders. But the household is a transmission belt. When the salaried nurse or teacher is squeezed, everyone she carries falls with her. A regime can survive on its middle class’s loyalty, but it cannot survive on its middle class’s mounting bills as the cost of living climbs.
2. Every channel has been sealed.
The political voices that emerged from 2021 have been jailed or gagged: former MPs Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube were sentenced in 2024 under terrorism and sedition laws. Dube was released in November 2025 under a royal pardon that barred him from speaking to the press or on social media; in mid-September, he vanished amid an inquiry into an alleged breach, telling his family he felt unsafe. Thulani Maseko was shot dead at home in January 2023, hours after the king warned reform advocates about mercenaries; his killers have yet to be apprehended. The African Commission found in 2025 that public order, terrorism and colonial-era sedition laws are routinely used to silence dissent.
Standing, borrowing from the historian Eric Hobsbawm, has a name for people like those who filled our streets in 2021, and I use it with some reservation: ‘primitive rebels’, who know what they are against but not yet what they are for. Every great transformation passes through that stage, he argues, and what follows is not decided in advance. Either the ‘rebels’ turn grievance into demands, for equality, for the freedom to organise, for communities with a voice, or they are captured by whoever offers the most seductive rupture. He calls that second path the politics of inferno. By jailing and gagging the voices that could have turned 2021’s anger into a programme, the palace has not ended the rebellion. It has, I fear, only made sure the next one arrives without one.
The continent has already shown where that leads. Across the Sahel, young Africans have cheered soldiers who promised rupture. In Burkina Faso, those soldiers dissolved every political party and criminalised same-sex relations. Rupture without rights does not end the palace; it builds another one.
3. Impunity teaches both sides.
Because no one answered for 2021, the security forces learned that lethal force carries no penalty. The young have learned that the courts seldom offer a remedy. Both lessons point in the same direction.
4. Institutions are being hollowed, not abolished.
Parliament debates the budget, but not the palace’s share of it. Commissions often investigate but seldom conclude. With the passing of Chief Justice Bheki Maphalala on 10 September, the choice of his successor, as the Constitution provides, sits with the king. When institutions are demeaned this way, people stop trusting them, and trust migrates to the only institution left standing. That is not loyalty; that is the absence of alternatives, dressed as devotion.
SADC’s second chance
The Organ, which the king now chairs, exists to steer member states on threats to peace, security and stability. At the same August summit, Lesotho was passed over for the next rotation because of its slow progress on constitutional reform, according to its prime minister’s office. A kingdom faulted for reforming too slowly now stands behind one where political formation cannot contest elections at all. Think about that.
This matters beyond Eswatini, because the precariat is a regional class. South Africa’s unemployment rate reportedly rose to 33.6%in the second quarter of 2026. Mozambique’s post-election unrest forced the Organ into an emergency summit in January 2025. In Madagascar, a youth-led uprising in 2025 ended a presidency, and SADC envoys have spent 2026 shuttling to Antananarivo. The region already knows what a young, jobless and voiceless generation does when patience runs out.
In 2021, SADC sent envoys to Eswatini and secured a promise of national dialogue. That dialogue has yet to happen; I hope to see it in my lifetime. In 2024, reportedly at the king’s request, SADC removed Eswatini from the Organ’s agenda altogether. Two years later, it handed him the Organ’s chair. The region now has a second chance to take the warning seriously, from an unusual vantage point: the chair of its security organ presides over one of the member states most likely to test it.
Standing does not conclude with despair. His remedy is security and voice: the freedom to organise, a basic income, and a share for every citizen in the returns of national capital funds like those Norway and Alaska already run. Eswatini does not need to invent that instrument. Tibiyo Taka Ngwane is held in trust for the Swazi nation. Paying that nation a dividend, delivering the unemployment fund promised in 2022, and letting emaSwati organise freely would cost the palace far less than another 2021.
The palace can read these four tiers as a map of whom to buy, whom to fear and whom to ignore. Or it can read them as the warning they are. No elite stays secure for long on a salariat in arrears, a precariat without protection, and a generation of jobless young people whose only safety net is a homestead the state can bulldoze with impunity.
June 2021 was not an ending. It was a warning, and I fear it has gone unheeded. The question is no longer whether emaSwati will demand a different settlement. It is whether the region will be listening when they do.
Melusi Simelane is a liSwati human rights practitioner, founder and board chairperson of Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities, and Head of Civic Rights at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre.