In early March, Ntsie Maphathe, then the Lesotho Electricity Company (LEC)’s chairman, stood before a group of journalists to announce the suspension of the managing director and nine executives.
The suspensions, which followed the damning external audit report that exposed rampant financial mismanagement, were meant to pave the way for a forensic audit to “investigate concerns related to procurement processes, financial management, governance structures, and operational inefficiencies”.
Maphathe was flanked by the Acting Energy Minister Mohlomi Moleko, Principal Secretary Tankiso Phapano and the entire board. He said the investigation was meant to deal with the rot festering in at the LEC for decades.
Moleko said the same and so did the principal secretary. And so we thought a new era had dawned.
The LEC, so we thought, was breaking with the financial mismanagement of the past and being thrust on the path to recovery. We were cautiously optimistic that something would change at the LEC.
Yet barely two months later we are witnessing a repeat of the same things that the Maphathe, the minister, the principal secretary and the board vouched to change.
The company’s monthly wage bill has escalated by a staggering M8 million after the board decided to pay the 10 acting executives 100 percent acting allowances. The acting executives are earning the same salaries as their bosses who were suspended, with full pay and benefits, in March. The LEC is paying double salary for each position.
This violates the October 2022 Human Resources manual which states that an employee acting in a higher position is paid 10 percent of the position’s salary.
We are disgusted. It is hard to find a cogent reason for that policy change, especially at a time when the company is saddled with over a billion in debts and getting grants from the government.
Generally, a change in a human resource policy should be informed by performance issues, market standards, changes in a law or financial considerations.
Ideally, it should be based on a survey or study of sorts.
The motivation should be in a board paper. None of those things seems to have happened in this case.
There were no performance issues to rectify.
The ten percent acting allowance the board cancelled is actually the market standard.
The company cannot afford an additional M8 million on its wage bill per month.
There are no pressing legal issues to consider. There were no consultations with stakeholders either.
So what is the board’s motive? We believe it’s in line with the looting that is the culture at the LEC.
The acting executives just could not accept getting only ten percent of their suspended bosses’ salaries.
Some of them said so in the corridors.
Having taken over as the acting managing director, Maphathe wanted to earn what the managing director was earning.
The result is that everyone in an acting position is getting a 100 percent allowance.
The board’s mantra about cutting costs has been jettisoned.
The good governance they espoused doesn’t seem to bother them anymore.
We are seeing another sad spectacle of the management and the board feasting on the LEC’s meagre resources.
The minister and the principal secretary are conspicuously silent about this feeding frenzy.
Now that the acting managing director and the acting executives have their noses in the feeding trough, you can be certain that the forensic audit will take months or even years to complete.
We suspect the board members are also being pampered with the sitting allowances generated by frequent meetings whose justification is that the company is in a crisis and therefore needs close supervision.
In short, the situation at LEC remains the same as it was before the executives were suspended. It’s likely to remain so in the foreseeable future for as long as they put personal interests ahead of those of the company.
