Lesotho, the Mountain Kingdom, the Kingdom in the Sky, is the only country we call our own. But it is a country that lacks ambition and desire. Today I am going to challenge the mindsets of longtime and expired political activists as they call themselves. I will set to present some discussion matter that a good number of people will be fearful of debating. It is not the type that Sunday political party choreographers and dancers alike will find easy to comprehend given the nature of political brainwashing seen and experienced in the Mountain Kingdom.
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I am extremely sorry but unashamed if I will have shut the door in your face. But some things have to be discussed. It’s time we changed our mindset if Lesotho is to become a recognised role player in global economies and industry.
Travelling exposes one to different scenarios, travelling beyond the geographical borders of one’s country gives one a different perspective and expands limitations and scope. I have been to Rwanda for the third time and every time I disembark from the aircraft, I stand in awe on how the people of Rwanda are developing their country.
Let me touch base on history in order to predicate this subject I will be presenting. Lesotho regained political party democracy in March 1993, exactly a year earlier than the Rwanda genocide which lasted for 100 days and had over a million Rwandese lives obliterated. My comparison will therefore have credibility.
It is now 30 years since the reintroduction of multi-political party democracy in the Mountain Kingdom and it is pretty much the same time that Rwanda had to reposition itself after the genocide. There are two different types of democracies practised by the two countries but with extremely different outcomes over the same period of time.
I have had debates with my peers and political mentors. On numerous occasions I have been labelled as an autocrat and not a democrat. I, to a certain degree, agree with them.
I agree with them because to Africa, democracy is a new thing, shoved down our spines by westerners pursuant to the extension of their colonial hold on weak systems and people who could be manipulated to execute the order of the colonial masters to the detriment of the nation and its future.
Yes, Rwanda has an autocratic leader, one who follows inherent African democracies as opposed to Lesotho which practices Westminster democracy at the expense of Moshoeshoeism.
Many who oppose the success of Rwanda make reference to political killings which have happened in Rwanda. But they seem to forget that just a few months ago we rose as a country to the top three murder capitals of the world.
Murders which most of them can be attributed to among other things political intolerance. We seem to see the speck in the other person’s eyes while being blinded by the logs in our own eyes.
Those who read history will agree that the USA, the champion of Western democracies, is economically strong today because many African lives in the form of slaves were lost. Need I say more?
The same happened in Germany with six million Jews being slaughtered under Nazism. How many lives were lost during colonial times when the Europeans were stealing Mother Africa’s natural resources?
The argument is that autocratic regimes are built on the lives that are lost.
What has Lesotho achieved by religiously following the Westminster democracy? Let us compare Lesotho, eSwatini and Rwanda as well as Botswana.
Can we for argument’s sake rank these countries among themselves starting with the least developed? Without doubt Lesotho is the opener in the ranking criteria and yet it has and still continues to vehemently uphold failed democratic systems, systems which are manipulated to serve the interests of those who still remain in the colonial era in spite of it being the end of 2023.
Sadly, the vision of many a Lesotho political party is to get into Parliament and then Government in order to hire its political activists at the Home Affairs Ministry and spread them across the length and breadth of the Kingdom. Doing what? I am yet to get an economic explanation.
From my hotel room, the Hotel Serena, in Kigali, I could see four new multi-story buildings take shape, all surrounded by scaffolding. This is an epitome of a growing economy. Tell me where in the city of Maseru did you last see scaffold-clad buildings, how many?
The four that I am making reference to were the ones in close proximity to the hotel I stayed at. Going into the city of Kigali there are many more scaffold clad developments.
In the city of Maseru, the only buildings with four or more floors are the two Post Office buildings, the LHDA building, MGC building, Avani Lesotho, Oxford Building, Victoria Hotel, and probably two other buildings. Is this all that we can as a nation point out to? When was the last one completed? What does it mean to our economy? Is it stagnant or is it growing?
As political party MPs hog the headlines for imbibing on whisky along the banks of the Vaal River, showcasing their remix of olden days clash of the choirs, I mean village concerts with the rendition of Puleng wa potsotso, ba shaya step, holding Parliament to ransom and betraying the electorate, does this show their economic vision and prowess? Will this change the outlook of the nation’s economy? I doubt it.
As I have stated earlier, in Lesotho, political parties feel a sense of achievement whenever they manage overthrow governments elected by Basotho pursuant to their desires for a better future.
Now, are we proud as a nation if seasoned politicians will do everything in their power and influence to force Basotho to abhor all forms of development? I mean, Moshoeshoe I International Airport is so dilapidated that it is being monitored by IATA on a monthly basis. At one stage it was on the verge of losing its licence. Yet when a new dispensation shows desire to refurbish it, we all know what happens.
The new dispensation desires to use the arable land that had been left untilled for decades in a partnership which will see the landowners getting 20 to 30% shares at harvest time without investing money in the project. What do the unscrupulous political leaders do?
They say that the owners of the land would only get 20 to 30 bags from the harvest. These are people who know that 20 or 30% is not 20 or 30 bags but rather some figure that will depend on the harvest outcome. The opposition won and people refused to partner with the government. Suffice to say the same people would have at least reaped something compared to the nothing they will get from their untilled land.
With untilled land, the government and the people have at their disposal the opportunity to supply the Middle East with food, develop the airport such that it becomes a hub thus opening more economic opportunities. Libya and most Middle Eastern countries were for many years a desert, but they dedicated themselves to doing things outside the box and turned their deserts into oasis and cultivated those deserts and produced food.
Realising that their cadres’ contracts at the Ministry of Home Affairs were coming to an end, instead of working with the government in tenure to find an equitable way of addressing replacements at the same Minsitry, ho kampa ha binoa Puleng oa potsotso. I mean this would have been a win-win solution.
When the Puleng oa potsotso escapade fails, the choreographer sniffs around for the next course of action and in an act of desperation succumbs to a plot hatched at one of the waterholes in Maseru by some political lightweights who form a shadow party from across the border. I somehow suspect that the Vaal River charade might have been where the idea was conceived, I mean the result of jumping into bed after imbibing often lead to such outcomes.
So, while we praise and claim as well as advocate for the Westminster colonial mindset of democracy against African democracy, it is clear that Lesotho with all its potential will probably never get to see real economic growth for decades to come.
Mokhosi Mohapi
