swazidayz

... happening in Swaziland

Friday, February 15, 2002

The state of the nation... Today is hot and sunny in the kingdom and flies are riding the heat like kings; mosquitoes are back in action, buzzing in a lady's ear, and snakes are hosting a slalom in my local river...yesterday I was called in to help a friend's friend, who was visibly very sick with a bronchial infection. Other friends had taken her to the hospital on the evening before and waited hours--without her being attended to. They took her back the following day and waited all day--without her being attended to. Angry and exhausted they called me. I took her to town, went to the chemist and bought some antibiotics and antipyretics to treat her myself. What a shambles! I'd heard the government hospital was bad, but I never thought it was this bad! It's true then what the average Swazi says, that you only go to the government hospital if you're dying--and all that they will then do is bury you.


Tuesday, February 12, 2002

All the news that's fit to print... the PM is under fire for deliberately overriding the rule of law in ensuring that clerk Ben Zwane was not admitted into parliament last week or this. For many punters expressing their views in the street the PM's action is neither surprising nor worth worrying about since 'the law is bent to suit the powerful anyway--it's not there to help us'. This is a sad, even despairing, comment but it epitomises the current mood of the nation at the moment.
Alos today I wrote an article for the newspaper developed from one of last week's logs. The article, working title Baby boomer, will probably be published this coming Sunday in the Times of Swaziland Sunday (http://www.timesofswaziland.co.sz) and then posted onto the Swaziplanet website.

Monday, February 11, 2002

This week the hotels get it right; the supermarket gets it wrong.
For a long while now we've been urging the quality hotels to do something to attract locals--at prices locals can afford--and not just focus on tourists and their relative abundance of money. This week is a start: at Lugogo there is a Valentine's Day special, with a meal, bed and champagne breakfast for a very reasonable deal. And to make their intentions clear, they'ce added that the special is 'for locals only'.
The SPAR supermarket in Mbabane, on the other hand, got it wrong yesterday (Sunday) when it unexpectedly closed early, at 1.00 pm, on an excuse of stocktaking. It had taken them a while to establish Sunday afternoon as a viable time for shopping, but a consumer base had steadily grown and shoppers were still streaming into town to shop long after the supermarket had closed. Saying that next week all would be 'back to normal' makes no sense, for there is no such thing as 'normal' in this kind of thing: what shoppers will always remember is that on any given Sunday arriving after 1.00pm mean risking finding the shop doors closed.

Sunday, February 10, 2002

A lot of kudos arriving through the mail recently--wanna-be writers wanting to correspond, lost-in-transits missing home and loving the website, people signing up for swaziplanet's irregular newsletter, readers enjoying the newspaper column and so on... it's always gratifying to be read, and since we all love to be loved, praise is always easier to swallow than vilification. As a writer though, I appreciate good (ie valid and constructive) criticism. Naturally, my skin crawls to comments like 'Are you still writing that rubbish?', especially when the attack is directed solely because an article undermines narrow-minded tunnel thinking. Yes, writing is subversive--the pen is always mightier than both the sword and gibberish from pulpit or politician. [Rant] God gave us brains so we could use them, not switch them off because some self-appointed do-gooders or megalomaniacs want to decide our lives for us. [Rant ends]
A sunny Sunday... I'm off to town to buy the newspaper and some spinach, my favourite vegetable. Like Popeye I can [that's a pun] eat the stuff everyday.