House of Assembly of Eswatini

The House of Assembly of Eswatini is the lower chamber of the country's bicameral Parliament.[1] The Assembly may debate and pass bills.[2]

Eswatini
This article is part of a series on the
politics and government of
Eswatini

Constitution

A maximum of 76 members are permitted by section 95 (1) of the Constitution.[2] There are currently 66. Fifty-five members are elected from single-member constituencies corresponding to the tinkhundlas (tribal communities).[2] Fourteen tinkhundlas are in Hhohho District, 11 in Lubombo District, 16 in Manzini District, and 14 in Shiselweni District. The King appoints the other ten members,[2] at least half of whom must be women.[3] The 66th member is the Speaker of the House, who is elected from outside the House.[2] If the percentage of women members falls below 30%, a maximum of four women may be elected from the administrative regions.[1]

Each member must be a citizen of Eswatini, at least 18 years old, a registered voter, and have "paid all taxes or made arrangements satisfactory to the Commissioner of Taxes".[3]

The House selects ten of the 30 members of the upper chamber, the Senate of Eswatini, the King appointing the rest.[4]

Elections

Candidates are first nominated at the tinkhundla level. The top three finishers by secret ballot then proceed to a general election, also by secret ballot, in a first-past-the-post system of voting, where the candidate who receives the most votes is elected.[3][4] All candidates run on a non-partisan basis, as political parties are banned in the country, and serve five-year terms.[1]

Observer teams from the Commonwealth of Nations were present at the 2003, 2008 and 2013 elections.[5] The most recent election took place in September 2018.[5]

gollark: It seems to me as if it's deliberately designed to make third-party stuff as annoying as possible. The examples are all for PHP, it uses a weird system[1] instead of fairly standardized HTTP response codes, there are some special cases (-2 and -1 on hoursleft on a dragon) which are a bit weird, and the API keys are request-only. I emailed TJ09 asking for one and got no response (EDIT: oops, there's a request form. Either I missed that or it was added recently.)
gollark: It's a shame the DC API isn't more, well, usable. There could be loads of cool stuff like that made.
gollark: I think I saw an inbreeding coefficient calculator at some point.
gollark: Now to name one *The* Dragon of Orangeness.
gollark: And there's no way to contact the person.

See also
  • History of Eswatini
  • List of national legislatures
  • List of Speakers of the House of Assembly of Eswatini
  • Legislative branch

References
  1. "The Parliament of Swaziland". Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2016-11-01.
  2. "Legislature". Government of Swaziland.
  3. "Swaziland's Constitution of 2005" (PDF). constitueproject.org.
  4. "Swaziland: Constitution and politics". Commonwealth of Nations.
  5. "Swaziland National Elections / 20 September 2013 / Report of the Commonwealth Observer Mission" (PDF). Commonwealth of Nations. 25 September 2013.
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