Opponents of the king suspect his forces’ hand behind Thulani Maseko's assassination
Just after 10pm Percy Mawelela was driving on the highway between Eswatini capital Mbabane and the city of Manzini when he heard a loud explosion and saw ahead of him the smoking wreckage of a white car on the yellow line under an overpass.
A fourth man shouted down from the overhead bridge in a language Mawelela didn’t understand, threw a red cord down to the highway below, and walked off into the darkness. Another motorist who arrived at the scene took the man with the bloodied face to hospital. Expressions of shock and outrage poured in from the opposition People’s UDM and its youth wing Swayoco — both outlawed as “terrorist organisations” after the 2008 bombing — lawyers’ bodies, and the Swaziland Solidarity Network , based in exile in Johannesburg.In 2008 the premature detonation of the Lozitha bomb proved to be the height of a bombing campaign against state targets claimed by the Umbane People’s Liberation Army, purportedly a secret armed wing of Pudemo.
My source informed me that Swaziland Liberation was given political education in Marxism-Leninism by six Cosatu members led by Godfrey Sibiya, chair of the Nkomazi district of the SACP’s Young Communist League. Sibiya admitted to me that he held regular “socialist forum political schools” and assisted Swayoco refugees in his district, but denied knowledge of the armed formation.
A favoured tactic to keep the struggle out of the public eye, according to local underground militants, is for the police to poison activists so their eventual deaths seem to be of natural causes. Meanwhile, older generation pro-democracy leaders such as lawyer Simon Noge and Pudemo’s Musuku died — so the initiative seems to be in the hands of the youth again.
Opponents of the king suspect his forces’ hand behind the Maseko assassination as the lawyer had been at loggerheads with the monarch since Maseko praised the would-be bridge bombers in 2008, later spending two years behind bars for contempt of court. King Mswati had boasted in a speech only hours before the killing that “demonic elements perpetrating disharmony ... will be eliminated in this new year.
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