The Secretary General of the Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS), Comrade Bafanabakhe Sacolo, together with other comrades will be spending their second night in jail, with the Mswati autocracy refusing to release them. It has emerged that the regime intends to present them to court on Monday and keep them behind bars on trumped up charges. Meanwhile, the police still refuse them access to a lawyer, a right they should not be denied.

The comrades were arrested on Friday 21 May 2021, following the royal police’s violent disruption of an otherwise peaceful memorial service mourning a young university student, Thabani Nkomonye, who fell at the hands of the royal police last week. The police sprayed teargas at the mourners, assaulted and thereafter abducted many others, including Comrade Sacolo.

The CPS calls for contininuous vigilance among the people as the royal police have vowed to go on a countrywide witch-hunt to effect more arrests in order to appease their boss, Mswati. We also call for more solidarity with the incarcerated comrades and increased activism among the masses in the call for democracy in our country. The masses of our people must also come out in their numbers to defend the right to protest and also call for justice for those who have been violated by the police.

ISSUED BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SWAZILAND