THE people of Fobane are mourning five people brutally murdered last Saturday. The suspects are still at large but the gory incident bears the hallmarks of a famo gang-related attack.
Precisely, the police suspect the killings are linked to famo gangs involved in illegal gold mining in South Africa. That these murders could be linked to famo gangs is not a discovery.

The gangs have left a trail of carnage in villages across the country.

The tit-for-tat murders have escalated over the years.

Yet, curiously, the number of suspects arrested and convicted has not increased at the same pace.

Hundreds have been killed in the gang wars but we are hard-pressed to recall any famo gangster convicted of murder. Those who have been arrested have been granted easy bail and skipped the country. Some routinely sneak in and out of the country to commit more murders.

There is brazen impunity about the murders.

At some point, the police should admit that it has neither the will nor the skills to deal with this menace. Yet that admission would just be a formality because their failure is well known. So is the fact that some in their ranks either belong to the same murderous gangs or supply them with illegal guns.

That complicity and incompetency explains why the police have dismally failed to deal with the gangs.

Politicians should take their fair share of the blame.

Some of them have openly embraced the gangs for political support. It is also known that some of them have received donations from the gangs. Little wonder their condemnation of the gangs appears timid and insincere.
We are disappointed that even this new government appears to have been quickly overwhelmed by this crisis. It doesn’t seem that there is much political will to take the gangs head-on.

We have not heard of many cases in which Lesotho is seeking to extradite gangsters wanted for murders. If anything, we are aware that some of those wanted for murders in both Lesotho and South Africa continue to roam freely. Our parliament is not clamouring for action from the government.

Nor have the been shown any appetite for legislative interventions to tighten bail rules or make the sentences stiffer.

Because there is no law specific to criminal gangs in Lesotho, the police have failed to break up gangs. They know that most of the hitmen are acting on orders but they don’t seem to have the capacity to go after the real bosses.

The investigations don’t appear to be systematic.

The point we are making is that we need new laws and new systems to deal with the gangs.

We might also add that we probably need new police officers for this job.

We cannot continue to behave as if it’s business as usual when gangs are wreaking havoc in our villages. The old strategies and laws have failed. The police, in its current form, has failed.

It’s time to try new things.

PARLIAMENTARY portfolio committees have a way of extracting honest answers from public officials and ministers.

Thanks to a session of the Law and Public Safety committee on Tuesday, we now know why Basotho are not getting passports and Identity Documents (IDs).

Home Affairs Minister, Lebona Lephema, blamed it on the lack of funds.

The only shocking part of that revelation is that it is coming from a minister of a government that promised to deliver basic services like passports and IDs.

They promised that this was not going to happen but the list of services this government is failing to deliver is now embarrassingly long.

We find it disappointing that it had to take some pointed questions from a committee for the public to get that obvious and simple explanation from the minister.

The ministry should have made that announcement without prodding. It’s simple public relations.

Equally puzzling is why this crisis was not raised when the MPs were discussing the Ministry of Home Affairs’ budget for this year. The MPs knew of this problem months ago but none seems to have remembered to forcefully push for the ministry to be allocated enough funds to produce IDs and passports.

There are no surprises when it comes to passports and IDs because those numbers can be easily predicted. The ministry can easily estimate how many people will need to renew their passports and IDs in the next few months.

Both can be predicted to the date.

The government cannot therefore claim that it underestimated the budget allocation or there has been some unexpected surge in applications and renewals.

The fact is that it just didn’t prioritise the production of IDs and passports. This crisis is therefore self-inflicted.

But the other reason for the ID and passport crisis was buried somewhere in the minister’s testimony.

He said after struggling with the middleman the ministry went straight to the manufacturer of the passports.

That direct interaction was supposed to make business easier and quicker but there was another problem.

The minister said the manufacturer rejected the government’s letter of credit and demanded cash upfront.

The company was not being unreasonable because the Lesotho government is notorious for not paying suppliers. The treatment that the Ministry of Home Affairs is getting from international suppliers is the deserved harvest of a terrible reputation earned over the years.

We cannot get favourable payment terms or use letters of credit to do business with international companies because we cannot be trusted.

We have squandered our goodwill and we are now being treated like a rogue country that should not be treated according to international business practices.

We believe the reputation can be regained and money can be found.

But those are not the ultimate solutions. We believe the government could be wasting a crisis. This might be the opportunity to move to a digital ID. Gradually phase out the physical ID by encouraging those with smartphones to use digital ones.

Perhaps it is also time to increase the passport fees.

Surely M130 is not a fair fee for a passport. It also explains why some people deliberately lose their passports when they have overstayed in South Africa. They know they can easily afford a new one.

We are not saying the government should not subsidise passports but that the public should pay its fair share. Maintaining the current fees doesn’t help the public or the government.

The fact that many are willing to pay more for their passport is proven by the large number of people paying M630 for an emergency passport.

It is also common knowledge that many people are paying a premium through bribes. The solution is to set the right fee to raise enough to produce passports and force people to value them.

THE former ruling All Basotho Convention (ABC) party is back in the news, for the wrong reasons once again.
This time, the party’s National Executive Committee has conspired to block four candidates from contesting for the highly coveted position of deputy leader at an elective conference set for this weekend.

Over the last two weeks, Basotho had to bear the bad news with a spate of increases in the prices of basic commodities.
The Lesotho Flour Mills, the country’s biggest milling company, announced a seven percent price hike on all maize products. The increase is with effect from next Monday.

Those that have been blocked include former Government Secretary Moahloli Mphaka, Kefeletsoe Mojela, Katleho Molelle, and Lekhetho Mosito.

Mphaka told this newspaper this week that he has since instructed his lawyers to challenge the ban in the High Court.
That was to be expected.

On the face of it, the decision to bar the four looks irregular and highly unreasonable for a party that touts itself as a democratic party.

It would appear there are individuals within the ABC leadership who are not comfortable to allow a democratic process to elect a new leadership. They want to ring-fence the deputy leader’s position for their own cronies.

That is sad.

If party leader Nkaku Kabi fails to handle this dispute well, he risks yet another damaging split that would leave his party’s seriously weakened.

That is a possibility if history is anything to go by.

At one point, Professor Nqosa Mahao stood on the cusp of the deputy leader’s position until former party leader Thomas Thabane came up with a similar excuse to block Mahao. It all ended in tears for the ABC.

Mahao was to later walk out of the ABC with a sizeable chunk of supporters ahead of the 2022 elections. The result was that his departure severely weakened the ABC as seen from the general election results of 2022 where the ABC received a thunderous clap from voters.

Kabi risks going through a similar patch if he resorts to underhand tactics to block any potential rivals. We hope Kabi is not in any way linked to the decision to block the four.

There is fear among some ABC leaders that the four command grassroots support and could win outright if allowed to contest. It would be highly undemocratic to bar the four from contesting on the basis of a flimsy excuse that they were not in the party’s committees.

Kabi must not seek to surround himself with pliable “yes-men and women”. He must allow the best minds within the ABC to contest for leadership positions if the party is to make any inroads ahead of the next general elections.

That would allow the ABC to renew itself.

That starts with the elective conference this weekend. Any attempts to muzzle that democratic process will likely backfire for the party and its leadership.

At the heart of the ABC’s troubles is the party’s dismal failure to renew the leadership structures. While former party leader Thomas Thabane was a charismatic leader when he was at his peak, he made terrible mistakes by seeking to hang on to the leadership position when he was way past his sell-by date.

Thabane never made any plans for a smooth succession process. He had to be hounded out of office after he was accused of masterminding the assassination of his estranged wife Lipolelo Thabane in 2017.

Two years after Thabane left, his sad legacy of bungling continues to haunt the ABC.

It is precisely for this reason that Kabi must allow an unhindered contest for the deputy leader’s position. That is the best he can do to prepare the party for succession.