Two amendments were long overdue

It would be dereliction of duty for MPs to fail to move swiftly in passing the amendments.

We hope our MPs will, for the first time, all sing from the same hymnbook in passing the amendments.

The future of Lesotho is hanging upon such critical laws.

Take for example, the amendment to the Foreign Service Act.

The new amendment says it seeks to ensure that Lesotho has “professional career diplomats from the ministry responsible for international relations”.

Ambassadors “shall be appointed by the King acting on the advice of the Public Service Commission, following a transparent, merit-based, fair, and competitive process as set out in the Act of Parliament”.

The Public Service Commission shall have the power to discipline errant officers.

Ambassadors will be expected to serve a four-year term, which would be subject to renewal on good performance.

This is a brilliant piece of legislation that will likely aid in the process of stabilising Lesotho. Over the years, a sitting Prime Minister would unilaterally recall ambassadors only to replace them with his own cronies.

The result was political instability and constant fights that did not augur well for Lesotho.

The new proposed amendments will most likely put a stop to such madness.

At the core of Lesotho’s bouts of political instability is the fact that the national cake is very small. As a result, those who enter politics do so with a clear expectation that they will be rewarded somehow through diplomatic postings.

That way, they could benefit from their positions.

It is no wonder then that with every change of government we would see a swift change of personnel in foreign missions and vicious fights over who gets deployed to foreign missions.

Yet some of the people who were deployed had no clue what they were supposed to do, apart from lining their own pockets.

It is a no-brainer then that only competent people, regardless of their political affiliation, must be appointed to serve in foreign missions.

We also agree with the diagnosis that most of Lesotho’s political crises could be directly traced to challenges within the national security agencies.

The security amendment currently under discussion seeks to plug holes in the security infrastructure to ensure that there is no repeat of the 2014 to 2017 political upheavals.

The heads and deputies of the security agencies shall be “appointed by the King acting on the advice of the Prime Minister” “following a transparent, fair, merit based and competitive process”.

Under the new regime, the security agencies will come under the direct oversight of parliament.

Parliament will establish a National Security Commission which shall recommend to the Prime Minister the appointment of the heads and deputy heads of the National Security Agencies.

In the past, a sitting Prime Minister could directly appoint the head of a security agency without the input of others.

That has been disastrous for Lesotho.

We still vividly remember how former Prime Minister Thomas Thabane, without any formal warning, appointed the late Lieutenant General Maaparankoe Mahao the new army commander and how matters suddenly deteriorated until Mahao was assassinated by his colleagues a few months later.

It is incidents of that nature that the new legislation now seeks to stop.

By taking the power to appoint heads of security agencies away from a sitting Prime Minister, parliament would have succeeded in addressing what has been a real cause for instability in Lesotho.

The two amendments are therefore long overdue.