In 1968, at the moment of Eswatini’s independence, King Sobhuza II created a trust by royal charter and called it Tibiyo TakaNgwane — siSwati for “wealth of the nation.” Its stated purpose was to preserve Swazi culture and promote a high standard of living for the Swazi people through employment and enterprise. Nearly six decades later, Tibiyo is the country’s largest employer outside government itself, holding roughly 30 interests across sugar, coal, beverages, dairy, media, property, financial services, and tourism. It is also, structurally, indistinguishable from a single person’s private holding company: the fund is held by King Mswati III in trust for the nation, separate from the government, answerable to no parliament, and — according to reporting by Billionaires.Africa — pays no tax and its reports are not required to be submitted to Parliament scrutinised like government entities.
That reporting, published in April 2026 around the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s rule, is currently the only account making the no-tax and no-oversight claims in detail, and it should be read as such — a single, well-sourced outlet’s account rather than an independently corroborated fact, pending confirmation from a second source or Tibiyo itself.
A Family Office Wearing A Sovereign Fund’s Name
The core tension is structural, not rhetorical. A sovereign wealth fund, by definition, holds and grows capital on behalf of a state’s citizens, typically under some form of legislative or public accountability. Tibiyo was built with that language — “wealth of the nation” — but its governance sits entirely with one man, as trustee, in a country the IMF’s 2025 Article IV assessment records as having a poverty rate of 59% (2023) and youth unemployment above 58%. Billionaires.Africa’s reporting puts the poverty figure even higher, above 60% — the two independent sources are close enough to treat the general picture as solid: a fund named for collective national wealth, operating without the public accountability that name implies, in one of the poorest countries by income distribution in the region.
A “feedlot for the king and his inner circle” — the late pro-democracy advocate Mario Masuku’s description of Tibiyo, as reported by Billionaires.Africa.
That characterisation is an allegation from a named political opponent, not an established fact, and it should be read as such — but it captures the substance of a criticism that opposition figures have made since at least 2011: that Tibiyo functions less as a national development vehicle and more as a personal income stream. One detail sharpens the point on its own, without needing anyone’s characterisation: Tibiyo wholly owns the Eswatini Observer, one of the country’s two national newspapers. A fund controlled by the head of state owns a share of the press that covers the head of state — a fact worth flagging plainly to any editor using Eswatini Observer as a source on Tibiyo, the monarchy, or royal finances generally, including in TACR’s own prior reporting on Eswatini’s pension funds, which cited Eswatini Observer coverage of PSPF and ENPF.
Now Tibiyo Wants To Build The Next One
In October 2025, speaking at the Africa Capital Markets Forum in Sandton, Tibiyo’s managing director Dr. Absalom Dlamini unveiled plans for a new national sovereign wealth fund — separate from Tibiyo itself — targeting E5 billion in capital, framed as the government’s route to unlocking capital markets for national development. Dlamini described Tibiyo as a template: a “home-grown sovereign wealth model, built on local contributions,” that the new, more formal fund could learn from.
That framing deserves scrutiny rather than repetition. If the criticism of Tibiyo’s governance gap is accurate, then pitching it as the precedent for a new sovereign fund is either an attempt to import the same lack of accountability into a second, larger pool of capital — or a genuine signal that the new fund is meant to formalise what Tibiyo never had: public reporting, a legal mandate distinct from royal trusteeship, and a line of accountability that runs to citizens rather than to one office. Dlamini’s own remarks don’t resolve which. Reporting sourced to Eswatini Observer — again, Tibiyo-owned — is the only account of the E5 billion proposal currently available; a second, independent source confirming the figure, mandate, and structure of the proposed fund is needed before this detail runs as settled fact.
Worth noting for continuity: Themba Dlamini, Eswatini’s prime minister from 2003 to 2008, chaired Tibiyo from 1991 before entering that office — one data point in a pattern, not proof of one, but a reason to ask whether Tibiyo’s leadership has historically functioned as a pipeline into government rather than a body governed at arm’s length from it.
Where This Sits Against Eswatini’s Other Capital Pools
This is now the third major pool of Eswatini institutional capital TACR has examined, and the contrast is instructive. The Eswatini National Provident Fund and Public Service Pensions Fund together hold assets worth 52.4% of GDP, and — for all their own governance criticism, including a regulator the World Bank assessed as under-resourced — both are at least subject to actuarial valuation, a named regulator, and public reporting requirements, however imperfectly enforced. Tibiyo, holding a scale of assets that hasn’t been independently disclosed since a 2012 figure of E1.39 billion — almost certainly a significant understatement of its current size given fourteen years of acquisitions since — sits entirely outside that framework. It is Eswatini’s largest and least accountable pool of capital, run by the same head of state whose government is, separately, trying to convince pension funds to trust it with a bigger role in national infrastructure financing.
That’s the real story here, and it’s bigger than Tibiyo alone: Eswatini is simultaneously asking international capital markets to trust a new, more formal sovereign wealth fund, while its existing, six-decade-old “wealth of the nation” vehicle has never opened its books to the nation whose name it carries.
