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Misanet.com / IPS, 3 January - A long denial of its AIDS dilemma will transform Africa's smallest country into a destination for foreign migrant workers, to the dismay of a national leadership that seeks to keep the character of the traditional kingdom of Swaziland intact in the 21st century. - The workers who will keep the Swaziland economy going will not be Swazis, predicts an executive with the Swaziland Agricultural and Plantations Workers Union, the kingdom's largest labour body. - Swaziland will turn into the next Egoli, which means the 'place of gold', says Robert Mkhombe, a garage owner in the capital Mbabane whose small business employs several migrant workers. Egoli was the name given to Johannesburg by migrant workers from Swaziland and other Southern African nations in the 19th century, when British colonial taxation forced young people to seek employment in the gold mines of the region's largest metropolis. Now, following a perverse law of unintended consequences, migrants from all over Southern Africa will descent on a land of smaller opportunities, but soon to be available jobs, unless public health policy changes drastically and immediately. The reason is that while the Swazi government of Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini is ambitiously seeking foreign direct investment to boost the kingdom's industrial sector, the workforce continues to be ravaged by AIDS. In order to man new factories, healthy workers will have to be imported from neighbouring Mozambique, countries further away, and even South Africa, creating an ironic and historic reverse migration of labour. Enterprise and Employment Minister Lutfo Dlamini broke the news last month that a major investment disappointment that occurred recently was due to AIDS fears, rather than trade problems as the media has assumed. Dlamini said that Nein Tsing garments, a company from Taiwan that had announced with much fanfare that it would open a factory in Swaziland, investing over 93 million US dollars and employing 5,000 workers, had chosen instead to locate in Lesotho because it wished to import workers. - The company was reluctant to train Swazi workers who would fall ill in a year or two, said a source at the ministry. Government turned down the company's request, which became a deal breaker. Since Prime Minister Dlamini took office in 1996, after a stint as a World Bank executive, his administration has made foreign investment a priority to lower Swaziland's unemployment rate, which stands at 45 percent, according to the ministry of finance. - Poverty alleviation is our aim, and for every Swazi who has a job, nine other people, family members and dependants of the worker, benefit, Dlamini said in an interview. It would not do, therefore, to allow foreign workers to take jobs intended for Swazis. But future refusals may become increasingly difficult, as HIV, which already infects a third of the population, according to one UN agency study, continues its relentless expansion. - AIDS is the disease that dares not speak its name in Swaziland, noted a Times of Swaziland editorial. It is taboo for an HIV-positive person to admit his or her status, leading to many people refusing to be tested for the virus. - Ignorance and fear are HIV's best friends, notes Hannie Dlamini, an AIDS activist who was the first Swazi to admit being HIV positive. "HIV has spread throughout the workforce." With no reliable statistics available on the number of Swazis infected by HIV, it is impossible to say to what extent the total workforce has been compromised. When an expatriate manager of the largest industrial company at the central Matsapha Industrial Estate told a newspaper two years ago that half his workers were HIV positive, he was attacked in the media, and the workers walked off the job in protest. - The manager was naive, believing that information would combat AIDS, when people do not wish to hear, said Thandi Kunene, a nurse. Since that incident, the only evidence of AIDS' effect on workers has been an increase in absenteeism and deaths, admits a company executive who speaks off the record. - The Nein Tsing company knew they could get all the workers they wanted in 2002, but they were concerned about 2006, noted the Times. AIDS activist like Hannie Dlamini, who heads a counselling agency for HIV positive Swazis, decry the health ministry's lack of a comprehensive AIDS policy, which they say makes inevitable a crisis in the workforce that will prompt an influx of migrant workers into the country. - King Mswati has declared AIDS a national emergency, but the Mbabane ministries are still inactive, says Kenneth Matsebula, another HIV-positive counsellor at Dlamini's agency. Swaziland will be profoundly impacted by such a migration. Africa's only single-ethnic nation has been a bastion of traditionalism and relative peacefulness. Swazis are content to be ruled by sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch in part as a way to secure cultural coherency. Migrant workers will bring an element of cosmopolitanism, and certainly foreign cultural influences unknown since colonialism introduced European modernity. - But by the time that happens there will be fewer Swazis, because of AIDS," says businessperson Mkhombe. "If the country is empty, other people will come and fill it." Health officials say the first warning of a workers' shortage brought by the loss of the Taiwanese garment factory to Lesotho should encourage government policy makers to take AIDS seriously as an economic as well as a medical dilemma. - Otherwise, they will be making policy for a Swaziland without Swazis, says nurse Kunene. "I am worried about our beautiful country. We have held onto our traditions when other African countries were not able to. But our culture lives only as long as we live."
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