African leaders and their excess
King Mswati III has got his priorities all wrong.
Wheeler dealer
Relative to the number of roads in his tiny southern African country, King Mswati III has a surfeit of horsepower. Then again, with 13 wives, each of whom has her own palace the king of Swaziland has a lot of royals to transport: his 27 children must be taken to school everyday.
In 2004, after media criticism of the 44-year-old monarch’s purchase of southern Africa’s only Maybach 62 (estimated cost: €325,000), the king banned newspapers from writing about his cars. Since then, Mswati has been seen arriving for the opening of parliament in a six-door Mercedes Benz S600 Pullman limousine.
Mswati head of an army that has never fought in a foreign conflict, only crushed internal dissent; as such, he has made surveillance, logistics and crowd control his priorities. The Umbutfo Swaziland Defence Force has three Alouette 3 helicopters, one IAI Arava transporter plane and seven RG-31 Nyala Mark 5E armoured vehicles, all bought from South Africa.
In 2002, Mswati paid a €2.6 m deposit on a Bombardier Global Express 19-seater; however, donors disapproved and the deal was off. This year, a mysterious “development partner” gave him a 36-seater McDonnell Douglas MD-87 which had a VIP conversion at Goderich Aircraft in Canada. The jet, worth up to €16m, was delivered for his birthday n 19 April.
Source: Monocle