By Wandile Dludlu.

The Sobhuza take over in 1968 left him and the Swazis in general with an urgent need for state qualified bureaucrats, management, admins and educated working class fit for purpose as the urge to replace white skilled workers became a clear and urgent question. 

There was an aggressive drive to send young deserving children of Swazis for education firstly to the tripartite Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (BOLESWA) tertiary education facilities based in ROMA, hundreds of the first independence graduates students benefitted, even though many came back with Sotho or Tswana chicks as wives or husbands clearly spoils for their education expedition. 

This was the period between 1968-1978 when once again the Sobhuza led government now established the first ever national University at Luyengo for agricultural purposes, Mbabane for nursing and environmental health purposes then Kwaluseni main Campus in 1978 to 1980.

These are the Swazis who in bigger numbers benefitted alot from education both through state effort, but also many were sent to England, Australia America and many Universities associated with the western world for which England was a big friend of, they were trained on secretariat courses,  admins,  accounting, surveyors and later engineers, doctors and various high-grade professions. 

Tax payers monies were used to invest in this generation not only for their development but it was a national investment. 

One wishes to put out without fear of contradiction, this generation many of whom served under the 1986 to date led by one leadership that totally never had the proper insight to real education, whether in the civil sense or traditional sense. 

The post Independence generation as well as  first and second UNISWA generation proved to be the most selfish, blind loyalty and unpatriotic generation, for mostly adopting a narrow egocentric posture, leaving a neither qualified, nor experienced leadership to lead the way even on technical matters, when for the first time, Swazis dominated the professional space, bureaucrats and administrative level of both public and private sector. 

We experienced corruption the most under the leadership of this generation, mediocre in policy implementation whether economic or developmental under this generation, today we are on a downward spiral perpetually with an economy fraught with structural flaws bequeathed from colonial development pattern that remained untransformed and worse a global economy turbulences beyond measure that has an obnoxious net effect to both the trade balance and economic trajectory.

The lesson that 2k generation ought to take home from this, is that when you get an opportunity to do career development, it’s not for yourself but a national investment, education has proven world over to be one sphere through which humanity can get out of poverty, ignorance, wars and undevelopment. 

Frantz Fanon Algerian Marxists could have never been more correct than when he said;

“Every Generation, out of relative obscurity has a mission, either to fulfill or betray” the first Swazi educated generation of 1968 to 1988, sold out for narrow self-enrichment.

They sold their professionalism, ethics and elightment that education alone would have pulled this country out of the royal failures that dominant to date.