Eswatini's Stalled Cannabis Bill: Formalizing a Colonial-Era Ban

September 4, 2026

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Drive into the highlands above Piggs Peak or through the valleys near Malkerns and you'll find cannabis growing on terraces that families have worked for generations, tucked between maize patches and pine plantations. Nobody in Eswatini seriously debates whether dagga, as it's known locally, should exist as a cash crop. It already is one, has been for decades, and everyone from rural growers to the Ministry of Health agrees the plant belongs in the country's formal economy rather than its shadow one. The argument that's stalled for nine years and counting isn't about morality or prohibition. It's about control: whether a new state authority gets to run the import, export and wholesale trade itself, or whether the farmers who've kept this business alive underground since long before independence get first claim on the licenses and the money. That fight has produced a bill nobody can quite pass, a king's government accused of sending police after its own growers, and a small nation watching its neighbor South Africa move faster on the same plant it's been quietly exporting for years.

A 1922 Law Still on the Books

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The statute still governing cannabis in Eswatini predates the country's independence by 46 years. The Opium and Habit Forming Drugs Act, passed in 1922 under British colonial administration, criminalizes cannabis use and possession outright, and it has never been repealed. Simple possession or use carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison under the Act's original framework, a penalty that has aged into the present largely untouched. Seven years later, colonial administrators layered on the Pharmacy Act of 1929, which added its own prohibitions covering cultivation, sale and possession, closing off any legal avenue for the plant to move through Eswatini's economy above board. Trafficking offenses sit at the harsher end of the scale, with penalties reaching as high as fifteen years for those convicted of moving significant quantities.

That these two colonial-era laws remain the operative legal framework a century later says something about how little political appetite there has been, until recently, to touch cannabis policy at all. When reform finally arrived in the form of draft legislation, it wasn't a standalone cannabis law built from scratch. The 2020 bill was explicitly framed as an amendment to the 1922 Act, tabled by the Ministry of Health rather than an agriculture or trade ministry, which tells you a lot about how the government has chosen to categorize cannabis: as a medicines and public health issue first, an agricultural commodity a distant second. That framing has shaped everything about how the regulatory authority envisioned in the bill would actually function, and it's a big part of why farmers who see cannabis as a crop, not a pharmaceutical, have felt shut out of the drafting process from the start.

The Bill That Wouldn't Pass

The paper trail on this legislation stretches back further than most people realize. Parliament first discussed draft cannabis legislation as early as 2017, years before it took the form most Swazis would recognize today. It wasn't until 2020 that the Ministry of Health formally tabled the bill as an amendment to the 1922 Opium and Habit Forming Drugs Act, giving the reform effort an actual legislative vehicle. By 2023, reporting from Semafor Africa had zeroed in on the bill's most consequential and contentious feature: the creation of a Medicines Regulatory Authority with sweeping powers, including the right to import, export and trade wholesale in cannabis and cannabis products on its own account.

That last detail is what turned a routine drug-law modernization into a genuine political fight. Saladin Magagula, chair of the Eswatini Cannabis Association, laid out the objection plainly: a regulator that also participates directly in the market it's supposed to police is acting as both referee and player. Farmers and traders who'd spent years cultivating cannabis in legal limbo saw a structure where the state could effectively become their biggest competitor, with licensing authority to boot. That's not an abstract concern in a country where political and business interests overlap heavily, and it's fueled suspicion that any authority built this way would favor politically connected entrants over the growers already doing the work.

The bill also faces a structural hurdle that has nothing to do with its content: Eswatini's constitution requires a three-fourths majority in both the House of Assembly and the Senate to pass this kind of legislation. That's an unusually high bar, and it's one the bill has repeatedly failed to clear. As of mid-2026, cannabis-law tracking sources following Southern African drug policy confirm the bill still hasn't been enacted. Recreational cannabis remains fully illegal in Eswatini, exactly as it's been since 1922, regardless of how much informal cultivation continues in the hills.

Farmers, Politics, and a 2019 Flashpoint

2019 marked the moment this dispute stopped being a quiet policy disagreement and became a visible standoff. That year, a controversy broke out around a joint venture reportedly seeking exclusive licensing rights over Eswatini's entire cannabis trade, an arrangement that alarmed both lawmakers and grassroots growers who saw themselves being cut out entirely. Parliament, for its part, refused to pass an earlier version of the Cannabis Bill that year, putting the legislature directly at odds with Cabinet. What followed, according to reports from that period, was troubling: the King, acting through the Prime Minister and Justice Minister, allegedly had police deployed against dagga farmers during the standoff, a heavy-handed response to growers who were, in effect, caught between an unresolved legal status and a government eager to assert control over the trade before formalizing it.

For growers like Maqhawe Tsabedze, none of this political maneuvering changes the daily calculus. Tsabedze has made his living from the illegal cannabis trade for two decades, income he's used to put his children through school in a country where formal employment is scarce and unreliable. He and others like him aren't opposed to regulation in principle. What worries them is watching a formalization process unfold that seems built to hand licenses to well-connected elites or foreign investors, while the people who've actually grown and sustained this crop through decades of criminal risk get left holding nothing but the legal exposure they've always carried.

Not everyone frames the debate around fairness to farmers, though. Business Eswatini's CEO has been vocal in describing cannabis regulation as an economic necessity rather than a moral or cultural question, arguing the country simply can't afford to keep leaving a valuable export crop in legal limbo while neighboring markets move to capture the same demand. That's a pragmatic case, but it sidesteps the exact question growers keep raising: necessity for whom, and regulated by whom.

Why the Informal Trade Matters So Much

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The stakes here go well beyond a single crop dispute. Advocates citing World Bank data point out that nearly 40% of Eswatini's population lives below the international poverty line of €1.70 a day, one of the starkest poverty rates in Southern Africa. Against that backdrop, cannabis cultivation in the highlands hasn't been a side hustle or a curiosity, it's functioned as an informal safety net for decades, providing income in rural areas where formal agricultural markets and wage employment are thin on the ground. Growers have taken on real criminal risk under the 1922 Act precisely because the alternative, subsistence farming alone, often isn't enough.

Eswatini's cannabis has also long fed demand across the border in South Africa and beyond, though nobody can put a precise figure on the volume, because none of it moves through customs or gets recorded in any formal trade statistic. That's the nature of a crop that's been illegal for a century: it has an export market, arguably a substantial one, that exists entirely off the books. Formalization, in theory, could bring that trade into the light and generate tax revenue and legitimate jobs. But small growers like those represented by the Eswatini Cannabis Association argue that any licensing regime has to include actual agricultural representation in its design, something Magagula has said was conspicuously missing from the 2020 draft. A regulator built by health ministry officials and lawyers, without input from the people who till the soil, is likely to produce rules that don't fit how the crop is actually grown and traded on the ground.

It's worth looking next door for contrast. South Africa's Cannabis for Private Purposes Act process has moved, however slowly, with sustained legislative attention and public debate about licensing, cultivation limits and commercial pathways. It's not a perfect model, but it represents a more active regulatory push than Eswatini has managed, and it puts pressure on Mbabane to catch up or risk losing ground on a crop it's arguably better positioned to grow.

Where Things Stand Now

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Six years after the Ministry of Health tabled its amendment to the 1922 Act, and nine years after Parliament first floated the idea back in 2017, Eswatini still doesn't have a functioning cannabis regulatory framework. No government source, not the Ministry of Health, not Parliament, has confirmed a vote or enactment as of mid-2026. The legislative record shows a bill that keeps getting discussed, drafted and re-drafted without ever crossing the finish line.

Coverage of the situation has gone noticeably quiet, especially compared to the sustained international attention on South Africa's parallel reform process. That's partly a function of scale, Eswatini is a small country with a small press corps, but it also reflects a legislative effort that's lost momentum rather than building toward a resolution. Whether the eventual bill ends up called the Cannabis Regulatory Authority Bill, the Medicines Regulatory Authority bill, or resurfaces under an older label like the Opium and Habit-Forming Drugs Amendment Bill 2019, the practical obstacle hasn't changed: it needs a three-fourths supermajority in both chambers, a threshold that has proven consistently out of reach regardless of which name or structure the legislation takes.

Until something clears that bar, the 1922 Opium and Habit Forming Drugs Act and the 1929 Pharmacy Act remain fully in force. That's not a technicality. It means every grower currently working a hillside plot, every trader moving product across the South African border, and every ordinary user in Eswatini is operating under laws that carry sentences of up to five years for possession and up to fifteen for trafficking, laws written by a colonial administration a century ago with no cannabis industry in mind at all.

What's easy to lose in the back-and-forth over authority structures and supermajority thresholds is that this isn't a hypothetical policy debate for the people actually growing the crop. Maqhawe Tsabedze isn't waiting on Mbabane to decide his livelihood is legitimate. He's already built two decades of income, and his children's education, on a trade the law still calls a crime. Every year the Cannabis Regulatory Authority Bill sits unpassed is another year growers like him keep working outside the law, not out of defiance, but because the informal economy still pays better and faster than a legislative process that's now stretched across three parliamentary terms with no clear end. Eswatini's government may eventually get the structure it wants, a regulator with real teeth and its own hand in the trade. But the farmers who kept this crop alive through a century of prohibition aren't likely to just wait around for permission to keep doing what they've always done.