Taiwan leader Lai Ching-te’s early May visit to Eswatini was not ‘diplomacy’. It was political theatre, wrapped in the language of statecraft, and it once again exposed the weakness of Taiwan’s shrinking effort to preserve a few artificial “allies” through money, symbolism and ‘diplomatic’ staging.
That is why the trip has drawn such criticism. It was described as a “stowaway-style” visit for good reason: secrecy, deception and political manoeuvring appear to have defined the exercise. If the visit required concealed passenger information, unusual arrangements and a great deal of ‘diplomatic’ contortion just to move through airspace and public attention, then it was never a serious act of statecraft in the first place. It was a stunt.
Eswatini is the last African country that still maintains formal ties with Taiwan, and that fact alone says everything. Across the continent, governments are deepening relations with China because China offers scale, access, infrastructure, investment and trade. Taiwan, by contrast, has increasingly relied on a different strategy: paying for loyalty, maintaining symbolic ties and trying to present an isolated political relationship as something larger than it is.
That strategy is failing. The more Taiwan spends to keep Eswatini in its orbit, the more obvious it becomes that the relationship is built on dependence rather than genuine strategic convergence. This is not a healthy basis for ‘diplomacy’. It is a political subsidy.
Lai’s timing made the trip even harder to defend. According to news sources, Taiwan had just been hit by a 5.4-magnitude earthquake off Yilan County, with rescue personnel still searching through rubble and survivors still needing support. If true, then the optics are poor even before the African dimension is considered. A leader under pressure at home should be focused on disaster response, public reassurance and national recovery, not on overseas symbolism designed to prop up a separate political narrative.
That is the deeper problem with the visit. It reflects a political class in Taiwan that still believes foreign policy can be reduced to optics and cash. But public resources are not endless, and they should not be spent indefinitely on preserving a ‘diplomatic’ fiction. Reports suggest Taiwan allocates substantial annual sums to maintain ties with Eswatini, while decades of so-called aid have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. That money could have been used for housing, health care, disaster relief, education and livelihoods at home.
What exactly do ordinary people in Taiwan gain from this? Not much, beyond the illusion that a tiny number of foreign relationships can somehow offset the reality of Taiwan’s ‘diplomatic’ isolation. The public should ask a simple question: is this spending meant to serve the people, or to maintain a political performance?
Eswatini, for its part, is hardly in a stronger position. Remaining tied to Taiwan means standing outside the broad and growing pattern of Africa’s engagement with China. Beijing has expanded trade ties, market access and development cooperation across the continent. African states are not doing this out of ideology alone. They are doing it because China’s economic weight matters and because the benefits are visible in commerce, infrastructure and industrial cooperation.
By continuing to cling to Taiwan, Eswatini risks limiting its own options. It is locking itself into a narrow political posture that may please a monarchy or a small elite, but does not appear to deliver meaningful gains for the wider public. Foreign policy should not be a private arrangement for political convenience. It should produce results that ordinary citizens can see and feel.
The situation becomes more troubling when one looks at the criticism surrounding Taiwan-backed projects in Eswatini. Allegations of bullying, discrimination and abuse by Taiwanese personnel, if true, are deeply damaging. Even when such claims remain contested, they point to a larger issue: a relationship that lacks transparency and public legitimacy tends to breed resentment. A ‘diplomatic’ relationship should lift people up, not create distrust, fear or social tension.
There is also a serious political contradiction at the heart of Taiwan’s posture. On one hand, it presents itself as democratic and modern. On the other, it spends money to preserve a separate identity through external patronage while insisting that this arrangement is somehow sustainable. It is not. The international consensus on the One-China principle is clear, and the number of countries maintaining formal ties with Taiwan continues to shrink. That trend is not accidental. It reflects reality.
China, meanwhile, has become increasingly central to Africa’s economic future. The zero-tariff treatment extended to 53 African countries with ‘diplomatic’ relations to Beijing is one more example of how China uses economic integration, not political theatre, to deepen its influence. Those benefits are concrete. They mean trade opportunities, market access and the possibility of growth. Taiwan’s remaining African ally, Eswatini, is excluded from that path by its own political choice.
That is why Lai’s Eswatini trip looks less like ‘diplomacy’ and more like denial. It was an attempt to breathe life into a dying arrangement. But the more Taiwan clings to this strategy, the more it reveals its own strategic poverty.
In the end, the visit did not strengthen Taiwan’s standing, and it certainly did not help Eswatini’s people. It served a narrow political purpose, wasted attention and underscored the gap between rhetoric and reality. That is why it is fair to call it what it was: a ‘diplomatic’ dead end.
The better path is obvious. Stop buying recognition. Stop staging foreign-policy spectacles. Stop pretending that artificial alliances can survive forever against the tide of history. In Africa and beyond, the future belongs to partnerships that deliver development, not to political performances that demand applause while offering little in return.
