Considering the fact that someone recently suggested a monarchy for Nigeria (https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-694757.0.html#msg8553749)


PLEASE READ ALL THE WAY TO THE LAST LINE.
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Prince Philip at 90: Relive the Blundering Royal's Most Embarrassing Missteps
By: William Lee Adams

REUTERS/POOL New

The Duke of Edinburgh, the man of a thousand gaffes, turns 90 today. As part of the birthday festivities, NewsFeed looks back at some of his biggest public blunders.
2009: "There's a lot of your family in tonight." After seeing business leader Atul Patel's name tag during a reception for 400 influential British Indians at Buckingham Palace.

2002: "So who's on drugs here? He looks as if he's on drugs." Singling out a 14-year old boy while addressing members of a Bangladeshi youth club.

2002: "Do you still throw spears at each other?" To William Brin, a successful Aboriginal businessman, during a visit to Brin's Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, Australia.


2000: "It's a vast waste of space." Speaking to guests at a gala celebrating the opening of Britain's £18 million ($29 million) embassy in Berlin.

2000: "Get me a beer. I don't care what kind it is, just get me a beer!" After Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato offered him a selection of fine wines at a dinner in Rome.

1998: "You managed not to get eaten then?" Asking a British student about his trek through Papua New Guinea during an official visit.

1995: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" To a Scottish driving instructor.

1994: "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" To residents of the Cayman Islands during a tour of the Caribbean.

1993: "You can't have been here that long — you haven't got a pot belly." To a British tourist he met during a tour of Budapest.

1986: "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes." To a British exchange student during a visit to China.

1986: "If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Offering his assessment of the culinary habits of the Cantonese at a meeting of the World Wildlife Fund.

1984: "You are a woman, aren't you?" To an indiginous Kenyan woman who presented him with a gift during an official state visit.

1976: "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." To journalists in Canada.

1969: "We go into the red next year. I shall probably have to give up polo." On the Windsor family's finances.

1965: "It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons." After seeing an exhibition on Ethiopian art.

1956: "You look like you're ready for bed!" Speaking to the President of Nigeria, who was dressed in traditional robes, during a state visit,


Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/06/10/prince-philip-at-90-relive-the-blundering-royals-most-embarrassing-missteps/#ixzz1Q56TxoAu

Red mist for polygamist Swazi king as wife No 12 'caught in bed with his justice minister friend'
By Mail Foreign Service

Last updated at 7:48 PM on 3rd August 2010

In the strange landlocked African kingdom of Swaziland, subjects must ensure they do not dishonour their monarch.

That rule goes for King Mswati III’s 13 wives as well.

And, despite shunning monogamy himself, he was in no mood to tolerate claims that his 12th spouse may have also enjoyed sharing her love with more than one partner.

He was unhappier yet when the man said to be having an affair with his beauty queen bride Mswati Nothando Dube was none other than his own justice minister and friend Ndumiso Mamba.

Anger: King Mswati III put his wife Mswati Nothando Dube, 22, under house arrest

[b]So, after engineering a sting operation and allegedly catching the two in bed, his 22-year-old wife has now been placed under house arrest while her Mamba is in jail.

Of course, the king’s 1.2million subjects have been made aware of this salacious story by the country’s press.

Facing execution: Swazi justice minister Ndumiso Mamba was allegedly caught in bed with Miss Dube in a hotel room


Instead, journalists there have been told to focus on the honorary degree awarded to the monarch during his current visit to Taiwan.

However, this has not stopped reporters from neighbouring South Africa exposing the scandal.

If convicted of the rather odd-sounding charge of ‘trespassing into another man’s home’, married Mamba, who was once a close friend of the king, could be executed.

While Miss Dube, a mother of two who got engaged at 16 after taking part in the annual pageant of thousands of topless Swazi virgins, could be banished from the kingdom.

The two were arrested at the Royal Villas hotel in a town near Mbabane, the country capital.[/b]


As is the custom in the tribal state, the monarch’s mother, who shares his power and is known as the Indlovukazi, or Great She-Elephant, sent a delegation to Mamba’s village to press charges.

Political commentators told the Daily Telegraph the alleged affair was '’common knowledge’.

Miss Dube first caught the king's eye at the annual Reed Dance six years ago.

Inkhosikati LaDube, as she became known, bore him a daughter within a year and a son soon afterwards.

High chieftain: Mswati III rules as an absolute monarch and enjoys lavish parties

Pick of the nation: Some of the 50,000 young, half-unclothed Swazi women at the annual Reed Dance pageant where Miss Dube caught the king's eye six years ago

British-educated King Mswati III, who is also known as ‘ngweyama’ or the lion, has ruled Swaziland since 1986.

The country, which also borders Mozambique, has one of the highest Aids rates in the world, with an estimated 40 per cent of the population is HIV positive
Also, 70 per cent of the people live below the poverty line.

The king, who rules as an absolute monarch and appoints the prime minister and cabinet, enjoys many lavish parties and the trappings of luxury.

His birthday on April 19 is regularly celebrated in front of thousands in a stadium where expensive gifts are presented to him on behalf of his people.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1299884/Scandal-12th-wife-Swaziland-king-caught-married-lover.html#ixzz1Q5AhGcSb

In 2005, more than 50 journalists gathered at Klosters, a Swiss ski resort, for a photo call marking Prince Charles' imminent wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles. During the shoot, Charles couldn't hide his contempt. "I hate doing this , I hate these people," he muttered to his sons Harry and William, unaware that his microphone was picking up every word.

Asked by the BBC's royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell how he felt about his upcoming nuptials, Charles responded sarcastically, "I'm very glad you've heard of it, anyway." He then turned his head slightly toward Harry and whispered, "Bloody people. I can't bear that man. He's so awful, he really is."



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2076816_2076800_2076803,00.html #ixzz1Q5MgB7qs

On Christmas Day 2000, 75-year-old pensioner Mary Halfpenny spent three hours making a flower display for the Queen Mother, then waited patiently outside a church on Sandringham Estate — one of the royal family's country homes — hoping to present it to her. The exchange never happened.

Instead, Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth II's only daughter, grabbed the bouquet and huffed, "What a ridiculous thing to do!"

The incident left Halfpenny reeling. "It was a really hurtful thing to say," she told reporters. "I've made baskets of flowers for the Queen, and she has always said how nice they are."

And Anne's un-princesslike attitude didn't end there: she reportedly told her nieces, princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, to "get a move on" and discouraged them from accepting flowers from well-wishers.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2076816_2076800_2076802,00.html #ixzz1Q5N14J4d

Swaziland: The madness of King Mswati III
Written by Annie Renard in Mbabane
Tuesday, 17 May 2011 10:36

While the Swazi king planned his jubilee, dissent was brewing via Facebook, resulting in an attempt to unseat the monarch


The North African-styled uprising designed to unseat Mswati on 12 April came from an unexpected quarter: the internet. Swaziland is more often seen as a traditionalist enclave than a hotbed of cyber-revolutionaries. However, its opposition in exile has become adept at using the internet to further its aims. Unsurprisingly, the police brutally shut down the brief attempt at an uprising.



Mswati has often dealt with unrest – his riot police beat and deported activists during the last round of protests in 2010. The difference this time is that the money has dried up, leaving the king vulnerable to scrutiny from the outside and dissent from within.



What rattled Swaziland’s elite more than the threat of an uprising was a Facebook page dedicated to publishing royal gossip. Writing under the name Gangada Masilela, the cyber-journalist responsible became public enemy number one.



Used to keeping the traditional press on a tight leash using ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation, Swazi authorities have found themselves at a loss when it comes to policing cyberspace. The organisation behind the ‘12 April Uprising’, the banned Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN), says the gossip site is a part of its strategy to destabilise the government. Based at South Africa’s COSATU House, the SSN also claims to have sources inside the royal court that are feeding it information.



On 25 April, pomp and ceremony marked King Mswati’s ‘Silver Jubilee’, but never, in his quarter century on the throne, has the beleaguered monarch seen his kingdom so volatile. Swaziland’s main source of income, Southern African Customs Union receipts, slumped by 11% of GDP last year. Although the IMF and others had long warned Swazi leaders to plan for this eventuality, it appears that the government had no such plans. By the IMF’s estimates, the country has been accumulating arrears since last September. While months of state electricity bills went upaid, plunging schools and government offices into darkness, reports that army rations had run out prompted Mswati and the government to swing into action.



Civil society critics warned that the ‘Silver Jubilee’ would be in poor taste given that civil servants were being asked to accept a 4.5% wage cut. The IMF recommended that the government slash the state’s wage bill by 5% if Swaziland hoped to bring the deficit down to single figures and to be eligible for loans from the African Development Bank and the World Bank.



Finance minister Majozi Sithole’s admission that between E40m-80m ($6m-$12m) a month is vanishing from state coffers due to corruption, prompted unions to get out their calculators: at that rate the savings from salary cuts would be used up in under a year. Dismissing a 10% pay-cut for cabinet ministers as a publicity stunt, unions and civil society groups took to the streets to call on the government to resign.



Meanwhile, the tide is turning against Mswati in neighbouring South Africa, the country Swaziland depends upon economically. Both the African National Congress Youth League and Congress of South African Trade Unions threw their weight behind the opposition’s protests and are putting pressure on President Jacob Zuma to rein in his royal neighbour.



This article was first published in the May 2011 edition of The Africa Report


http://www.theafricareport.com/archives2/politics/5140250-swaziland-the-madness-of-king-mswati-iii.html

The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 killed 259 passengers and crew members; in addition, large sections of the plane crashed into homes in Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 residents.

In 1993, as he was visiting the street where the victims on the ground died, the prince shocked locals by comparing their tragedy to problems at the royal estate. "People usually say that after a fire, it is water damage that is the worst," he said. "We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle."



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2076816_2076800_2076801,00.html #ixzz1Q5PQTNcw

In 2009, the British tabloid News of the World leaked a video in which Harry refers to his South Asian army comrades using racist language. Worse, the video had been filmed by the prince himself three years earlier.

Touring a room while his friends doze, he describes one officer as "our little Paki friend Ahmed," employing a derogatory term for a Pakistani. Later, he spots a colleague wearing camouflage netting over his head and says, "It's Dan the Man , you look like a raghead."

Prince Harry's spokesman fended off claims of racism. "Prince Harry used the term raghead to mean Taliban or Iraqi insurgent," he said. As for Ahmed, the spokesman claimed that Paki was merely his nickname.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2076816_2076800_2076804,00.html #ixzz1Q5PiPrRD