There was a time when this tiny kingdom was one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Between 1960 and 1990, income per person rose roughly fivefold. From 1986 to 1990, the economy grew by an average of 10% or more a year.
Then the pace broke. In the 35 years since 1990, income per person has only just doubled. Over roughly the same period, Mauritius, another small economy once heavily dependent on sugar, tripled its own. Vietnam entered the 1990s producing about a third as much per person as Eswatini. It has since multiplied its income per person roughly sixfold and overtaken us.
Hold both halves of that story. The first should cure us of the idea that Eswatini is too small, too landlocked or too late to grow quickly. We have done it before. The second should cure us of something equally dangerous: the belief that once growth arrives, it stays. Starting to grow is one achievement. Learning how to keep growing is another.
That matters now. The kingdom’s September medium-term forecast projects real GDP growth of 5.3% this year, supported partly by major infrastructure investment. Yet the same forecast expects growth to moderate to an average of about 2.6% after 2027 as major projects reach completion.
Previous editions of this column have asked what we borrow for, where our money goes and what today’s financial decisions leave us with tomorrow. This week, let us put economic growth through the same test. What makes growth last?
What is economic growth?
Strip away the jargon and a country’s income rests on two things: how many people are working and how much value each worker produces.
The first matters enormously where roughly one in three people who want work cannot find it. Yet adding more hands and hours can only take us so far. Lasting increases in income also require making each hour of work worth more.
Think of what irrigation does for a farmer waiting for rain. What better machinery does for a carpenter? Or what happens when a technician learns to maintain equipment that previously required expertise from elsewhere? Better tools. Better know-how. Better ways of working.
Then comes something 1.2 million people cannot escape: the customer. A factory producing at scale eventually needs more buyers than Eswatini alone can provide. Our definition of a customer has to stretch beyond Lavumisa and Oshoek.
We already export goods worth more than two fifths of what the economy produces. More than a quarter of those exports come from soft-drink concentrate, with raw sugar accounting for another substantial share. So simply saying “export more” misses the point. The deeper questions are what we sell, how much knowledge sits inside it, who owns that knowledge and how easily somebody elsewhere can replace us?
Five countries, five lessons
Building is not the same as growing forever. A road, dam or machine can lift output. The deeper return comes from what it allows people and businesses to produce afterwards. The September forecast captures that tension: strong growth while major projects drive activity, followed by slower growth as that cycle matures.
Growth spurts are surprisingly common. Sustaining them is not. Researchers have counted more than 80 episodes since the 1950s in which growth jumped and stayed elevated for at least eight years. There is no magic recipe, but countries that stayed up share some features: manufactured exports, stable prices, a currency that is not overvalued, accountable government and widely shared incomes.
Then there is investment. Investment is money making a bet on tomorrow. Private investment in Eswatini averaged about 15% of GDP from 1980 to the mid-1990s. In the two decades before the pandemic, it averaged below 10%. When businesses put less money into machinery, factories and productive capacity here, any serious growth strategy must ask why. Other small countries offer clues.
1. Mauritius may be the nearest twin: small, remote and once heavily dependent on sugar. It also enjoyed preferential access for sugar into Europe.
Instead of treating that preference as permanent prosperity, Mauritius used the breathing room to build export manufacturing. From 1970, approved export factories could operate as export zones, and exports from them grew by more than 30% a year during their first five years.
When the quota system sheltering clothing manufacturers ended in 2005, export-zone output fell sharply. Yet Mauritius was no longer standing where it started. Tourism and finance were already earning more than textiles. Mauritius treated the preference as tuition.
2. Lesotho shows why that matters. Same currency peg. Same customs union. The same American trade preference. Clothing employment surged from fewer than 10 000 jobs to more than 50 000 in five years.
Yet factories, managers and order books largely remained foreign, with too little capability embedded locally to reproduce the success without the preference. Hosting production creates activity. Learning from production creates capability.
3. Botswana began independence poorer than Eswatini. Before its first diamond mine opened, mineral rights were vested in the state. Diamond income was channelled through national development plans and surpluses saved. Over the next 30 years, income per person rose tenfold.
Yet it never fully built a second engine. When diamond sales weakened, its economy contracted by 3% in 2024. The lesson: manage the windfall, then use the time it buys to build what earns when the windfall weakens.
4. Costa Rica did that with knowledge. When Intel arrived in 1996, the country adapted around the investor. Electricity arrangements improved for large users and educators spent time inside Intel plants before technical curricula were redesigned.
Intel later stopped manufacturing, returned and is now closing the factory again. Yet the skills and reputation built around electronics helped attract medical-device manufacturers, which now account for almost half the country’s goods exports and support more than 60 000 jobs. The anchor came and went. What it taught stayed.
5. Rwanda. Small, landlocked and, in 2000, among the poorest countries on earth. It has since grown by more than 7% a year and tripled income per person. Part of its method was organisation: eight agencies became one development board capable of dealing with investors and making decisions. Its warning is financing. Much of the expansion relied on aid and borrowing, while public debt is close to three quarters of GDP. How you finance growth determines how much of tomorrow you promise to achieve it.
Five countries. Five roads. One pattern. Each received something valuable from outside: a preference, minerals, an investor or external finance. The winners used what was temporary to acquire something they could still own after it disappeared.
Borrowed booms
Eswatini should recognise that story. Our late-1980s boom was partly borrowed from circumstances across the border. Sanctions against apartheid South Africa encouraged companies to locate here to retain international market access. When South Africa reopened, some of that advantage weakened.
Another wave arrived after 2000 as Taiwanese clothing manufacturers used our preferential access to the American market. When that access was withdrawn in 2015, thousands of jobs went with it.
Twice a wave arrived. Twice it receded. The problem was not accepting the opportunity. We should have. The question is whether enough suppliers, technicians, managers, owners and knowledge became ours before circumstances changed.
Now a third wave is moving through the economy: an industrial park, solar and biomass plants, a dam, roads and other major projects. They help explain the 5.3%. The same forecast says some momentum fades as projects finish. What will we own when this wave goes out?
Perhaps there is a useful ladder. First comes relevance: the world has a reason to put a factory, project or contract here. Then prominence: local firms supply it, technicians learn the machinery, managers learn the markets and workers acquire skills. We move from hosting to learning.
Finally, dominance. For 1.2 million people, that does not mean controlling world markets. It means becoming exceptionally good at a valuable niche good enough that customers elsewhere come looking for what we know how to do.
What winning looks like
Nobody can promise that 1.2 million people will reshape world markets. We do not need to. Countries no larger and no luckier than ours have transformed their people’s incomes within a generation. Mauritius had a preference. Botswana had diamonds. Costa Rica landed an investor. Rwanda attracted external finance. The decisive question was what happened after the opportunity arrived.
At the pace Eswatini has managed over the past three decades, income per person takes roughly 35 years to double. At Mauritius’s pace, it takes closer to 20. Fifteen years looks small on a graph. It is enormous inside a life.
It is 15 more years in which a young person might struggle to find decent work. Fifteen more years before a small business operates in an economy twice as productive. Fifteen more years separating one generation from the opportunities another could have enjoyed.
That is why 5.3% cannot simply be a number we celebrate and move on from. As the roads are built, ask which businesses will use them to reach new customers. As the dam fills, ask what farmers will produce with its water and where they will sell it. As power projects come online, ask which factories can now produce more cheaply or reliably. When an investor arrives, count the local suppliers, technicians and managers learning enough to eventually do more of the work themselves.
And when government borrows, do not stop at asking how much. Ask what will still be earning when the money has been spent. That is the financial test behind all five questions. Not whether money moved, jobs appeared or GDP rose while a project was being built, but whether today’s spending leaves tomorrow with greater earning power.
Eswatini has seen growth waves before. Another is here. This time, the real win is not how high it takes us. It is how much stronger we are when it leaves.