Swaziland: Managing a ‘Labour Account Deficit’

Abstract

The people of Swaziland escaped the more extreme job dependency of their two sister territories, Lesotho and Botswana, due mainly to their country’s better land, its success at attracting investments, its access to labour from Mozambique, and to efforts by the colonial Swaziland administration to prevent labourers from leaving. Nevertheless the proportion of Swaziland’s population working in South Africa was still in the 4-6 per cent range for 70 years — lower than Lesotho, Botswana or Malawi, but still higher, for instance, than Zambia (see Figure 11, Chapter 10).