In August 2025, a senator in Eswatini’s parliament asked the country’s Commerce, Industry and Trade Minister a direct question: when would artists actually be paid. Manqoba Khumalo’s answer to Senator Lindiwe Ngwenya was equally direct. “At present, no disbursements have been made.” Seven years after Eswatini passed a law creating a national body to collect and pay out music royalties, that body had paid out none.
Weeks later, the same minister stood up again, this time to announce that UNESCO had given that body, the Eswatini Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Society, E1.5 million to fix exactly the system that had just produced zero payments.
What the grant actually buys#
The E1.5 million comes from UNESCO’s International Fund for Cultural Diversity, selected by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The project is called “Reinforcing Copyrights for Eswatini’s Cultural and Creative Industries,” and it runs from August 2025 to September 2026.
It buys three things, and none of them is a royalty payment. It funds training workshops for more than 400 creators, rights holders and users of copyrighted work, covering copyright law, licensing, compliance and the economic value of the creative industries. It funds a five-year national strategy for collective management and commercialisation of copyright, to be launched at an annual eSwatini Copyright Conference. And it funds public-facing education materials, pamphlets, infographics, films, podcasts and short videos, plus a new online copyright resource centre offering registration and licensing services.
ESWACOS’s executive director, Mmeli Hlanze, called copyright “the backbone of a thriving creative economy.” Khumalo called it “the heartbeat of innovation, culture and economic growth.” Neither comment is about money moving to a songwriter. Both are about building the apparatus around a collection system that, on the government’s own admission, had not yet moved a single payment.
The deadline the minister himself set has already passed#
Khumalo’s Senate answer was not vague about timing. ESWACOS began monitoring musical airplay on 1 April 2025. The minister told the Senate that royalty calculations would rely on cumulative usage data collected through 1 April 2026, and that distribution could only follow that monitoring window closing. About 100 artists had been registered during the reporting quarter, according to the ministry’s own First Quarter Report.
That 1 April 2026 date is now more than seven months behind us. This record could not find any source confirming that a first distribution has happened since.
The closest independent check available is an opinion piece in the Eswatini Observer published on 19 August 2026, a year after the Senate exchange. It puts the number of registered rights holders at roughly 400 and names six businesses that have taken out ESWACOS music licences: Sibane Sami Hotel, George Hotel, MTN Bushfire, Standard Bank Luju, Eswatini Biggest Braai and EswatiniBank. That is real uptake. But the Observer’s own framing treats the question of payment as still open, not settled: “the real test,” it argues, is “whether rights holders receive meaningful royalties.” A year after the minister’s admission, Eswatini’s own commentators are still describing that as a test still to be passed, not one that has been.
The same piece raises a second question this desk could not resolve either: a reported E2 million line in the 2024/25 national budget for music-rights licensing to the state broadcaster, EBIS. EBIS does not appear among ESWACOS’s own list of registered rights holders. Where that E2 million went, and whether EBIS actually holds the licence it was apparently funded to buy, is not addressed in any source this desk could verify.
What the grant does not touch#
It is worth being precise about what changes hands here, because it is easy to conflate a capacity-building grant with a rights transaction. No composition, master recording, publishing right or neighbouring right moves through this UNESCO funding. ESWACOS’s legal authority to negotiate licences, collect royalties and set royalty rates was already established by Eswatini’s Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act of 2018, before this money arrived. The grant pays for training, strategy documents and outreach pamphlets. It does not pay artists, and it was never designed to.
That distinction matters because the sequence of announcements, a Senate admission of zero payments followed within weeks by a seven-figure international grant for the same institution, can read as the problem being solved. The grant addresses the knowledge gap ESWACOS itself has repeatedly named as its biggest obstacle: workshop material, awareness campaigns, a registration platform. It does not address whether the roughly 400 people who have registered, or the handful of businesses that have taken out licences, have actually been paid anything for the use of their work.
What could not be established#
This desk tried to confirm more recent figures that circulated in secondary reporting: a claim that ESWACOS had collected roughly E500,000 in licence fees, engaged more than 100 businesses, registered more than 400 rights holders and documented more than 500 works, with a target of the 2026/27 financial year for a first distribution. Those figures, and a quoted line suggesting no Swazi creator had yet been paid, appeared only behind a reader paywall this desk could not get past to read the original reporting in full. They are not relied on here, because they could not be checked against the source text directly. If those numbers are accurate, they would mean collections have grown since the Senate exchange without a distribution following. If ESWACOS has in fact completed a first payout since August 2025, no source this desk could read in full reports it.
What this means for artists#
If you are an Eswatini musician who has registered with ESWACOS, the UNESCO grant changes what you are taught and what materials exist to explain your rights. It does not, on any source this desk could verify, change what is in your account. The minister’s own answer to the Senate set a floor: nothing paid as of August 2025, with a stated path to distribution only after a monitoring window ending April 2026. That window has now closed, and no confirmed distribution has followed it into public reporting.
The test is specific and checkable going forward. Does ESWACOS publish a distribution statement naming an amount paid, a date and a per-rights-holder figure, the way Ghana’s GHAMRO did when it distributed GH¢1.43 million to its members in July 2026? Until a document like that exists for Eswatini, registering with ESWACOS and being told a payment is coming are two different things, and only the first one has happened so far.
The pattern is regional, not unique to Eswatini: Malawi’s COSOMA calling a royalty cut a “system error”, Gabon’s minister confirming only 14 registered artists weeks after a royalty-tracking deal, and Ghana’s GHAMRO distributing real money while its own operating licence stays unconfirmed all show the same gap between the system a collecting society builds and the money that actually reaches the people it was built to pay.
