Alternative constitutional blueprint put forward

An assembly of pro-democracy forces, including human rights lawyers, labour unions and banned political opposition parties, at the weekend laid the groundwork for an alternative national constitution. King Mswati III has promised a palace-authored constitution, as early as October, which will permanently ban organised opposition to royal rule in the last nation run by an absolute monarchy in sub-Saharan Africa . "We seek an alternative to the royal constitution the palace will issue so it can retain royal rule forever," Jan Sithole, secretary-general of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions, told IRIN. "We are not gathered here to approve a constitution for the country, but to light beacons of what a new constitution could entail," Manene Thwala, an executive member of Lawyers for Human Rights (Swaziland), told the conference held at the northern village of Mananga. "The people have spoken," Mswati said last year when he accepted the recommendation of the Constitutional Review Commission, headed by his brother Prince Mangaliso Dlamini, that the royal house retain power. The commission spent five years assembling what it claimed were the views of ordinary Swazis regarding the type of government they want. None of the groups gathered at the Mananga conference were permitted to contribute their ideas to the commission, which refused to accept group submissions and banned press coverage of individual submissions. No record of those submissions has been released, nor has there been an accounting of how many Swazis presented their views or what they said. Groups, like the Swaziland branch of Women in Law in Southern Africa, which reviewed the commission's final report criticised it as "incomprehensible". "We reject the palace constitution as a fraud," Obed Dlamini, president of the Ngwane National Liberatory Front, the oldest political party and an illegal organisation like other political groups, told IRIN. The conference brought together church groups and members of the Swaziland Democratic Alliance, an umbrella body that acts as a federation for teachers and civil servant unions and other labour groups that seek political reform, and opposition parties like the People's United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), the largest political organisation in the kingdom banned under a 1973 royal decree. PUDEMO president Mario Masuku is currently on trial on a charge of sedition, for allegedly saying at a public rally in Mbabane that the monarchial government must be challenged. The blueprint agreed upon by the Mananga conference calls for the retention of the king as head of state as "a symbol of unity". The king's executive powers would be exercised in consultation with an elected prime minister, whose administration would determine government policy. "The king shall cease forthwith to have legislative and judicial powers, which shall revert ... to the arms of government, to be exercised in accordance with the stipulations of the constitution, as normally is the case in open and democratic societies," the Mananga plan states. It also calls for a bill of rights to ensure human rights, and for women to have full rights. Currently, women are legal minors in Swaziland. The next move is to "put the ball in the king's court," by presenting him with the conference's constitutional blueprint. Few participants at the conference expect the king to overturn the recommendations of his commission, and adopt a constitution that will limit monarchial power and end the authority of palace-appointed chiefs, who currently rule over 80 percent of the population. "But an alternative has been tabled. It's now out there, instead of the palace constitution being unopposed and people having to accept it blindly," a human rights lawyer said.