Eswatini is one of the last absolute monarchies in the world, and this week news came from there that many Western outlets packed into the same sentence: Princess Lindiwe Dlamini has died, the sister of King Mswati III - the man with sixteen wives. The number is accurate. The question is why that is the headline, rather than the woman who died.

Lindiwe Dlamini had cancer and was ill for a long time. She was married and had three children. Her career began in 1985 as an administrator, she entered government in 2008, became an MP in 2018, and served as interior minister until 2023. At international conferences she championed the economic empowerment of women. All of that is the biography of a politician with four decades of service - and yet the first thing the world learns about her is whose sister she was.

A kingdom that runs like a family firm

Mswati III took the throne at eighteen and has since ruled with no parliament able to tell him no. His father, King Sobhuza II, had around seventy wives, which means the current king has roughly two hundred and ten brothers and sisters. That is not an exotic detail for bedtime reading - it is a mechanism. When the state apparatus and the family are the same thing, a ministerial chair is not won, it is inherited.

The country covers 17,364 square kilometres, smaller than Macedonia. The king's personal wealth is estimated at over 200 million dollars. The two figures stand side by side and require no commentary.

Why this concerns us at all

Because the model is not as distant as it looks. Not the monarchy - the mechanism. A position you get through a surname, an institution that changes along with the family holding it, a biography that exists only as a footnote to somebody else's status. The Balkans know this scene by heart, just without the crowns.

Lindiwe Dlamini was interior minister of a state in which interior affairs are settled by one man. Did that office mean anything? We do not know the answer and we never will, because in Eswatini there is no opposition to ask.