Insight

Instabilities at NUL during BNP and military rule

Published

7 years ago

April 6, 2018

The Post

Continued from last week

The Amendment of the University Law in 1989 and Discursive Struggles and Instabilities

Subsequent to the animosity between NULASA and the GOL generated by the Taylor case, the GOL invoked its powers and amended the university law in December, 1989. The NUL (Amendment) Order (No. 21 of 1989) gave more powers to Government to control the University as well as giving University authorities powers “to take prompt action as and when it is deemed necessary” (NUL Order 1989:572-574).
This amendment followed the establishment, by the Military Regime, of a Commission of Inquiry into the activities of the academic staff of the National University of Lesotho – Commission of Inquiry into the Instability at the National University of Lesotho 1989 which reviewed evidence submitted by various players.

It is important to state that, sometime before this amendment, according to the Minister of Education, the experiment of 1975 “overdemocratised” NUL by “implement[ing] the concept of participatory administration complete with its freels” (sic) (Machobane, 1989:11).
Making reference to a legal case in which NULASA had taken the Administration (of which it was part under the participatory concept of administration) to the Labour Tribunal, and won a case against the so-called Administration, Machobane asked poignantly,
Now, who is the administration in this case? Materially, in this regard it was the VC, PVC, Registrar . . . who [all] have no executive powers; the Academic Staff Appointments Committee; the Board of Finance, and Council – of which academic staff are a principal part: the Chairman of the Association [NULASA] himself is a member of the Council.

Hence, in short, in so far as it is an integral part of the so-called management, the Academic Staff is at war with itself, and winning (Machobane, 1989:13-14) (emphasis in the original).
The trade unionism of NULASA and its political activism was loathed by the Military regime which began to cultivate the view that at NUL, the VC lacked real authority and power (Likate, 1989; Machobane, 1989). The majority of those who submitted evidence before the Commission in 1989 felt that NULASA was a destabilising force.

On its part, NULASA felt that management, in collusion with Government, was not only contemptuous towards academic staff, but was determined to destroy or undermine the union (Commission Report, 1989:27; Likate, 1989).
One of those who submitted evidence before the Commission was the University registrar who argued that the University Act, Statutes and Ordinances did not confer any specific authority on university leaders and that authority and power were “diffused randomly amongst officers and committees in a manner which did not define who does what and cannot do what without what having been fulfilled, . . .mak[ing] the University ungovernable/unmanageable” (Likate, 1989:4).

It was therefore not surprising that, among the findings of the Commission, was the existence of too many committees within the University’s administrative structures (Commission Report, 1989:16). In Likate’s (1989:1) view, the participatory governance structure through the committee system was ripe for “deadlocks over issues which may not inspire the support of one faction or the other”.
NULASA did not only refuse to cooperate with the Commission during its evidence gathering stages but it also flatly rejected the findings when they were made public and launched a campaign against the Military regime.

NULASA criticised the 1989 University amendment for its attempt “to supplant the powers of the University’s governing body and to give the Minister undue powers of appointing and terminating the employment of any member without notice” (NULASA, 1989:1).
Thus the amendment, when it finally came, did not give power to the VC but, instead, gave power to the Government through the office of the Chancellor. Instead of addressing the bureaucratic procedures of the University, the Government was given more powers to control the University. Under section 15 (6) of the NUL Order No. 21, 1989, the Chancellor could, without notice, terminate the appointment of, or dismiss any member of the University as he saw fit (NUL Order, 1989:572-574).

Coplan (1995:55) sarcastically suggests that one of Lekhanya’s “…achievements was Order No.4., a law that curtailed public criticism and abolished academic freedom at NUL, providing for the dismissal of any staff member at the governments discretion without explanation required”. This law produced further overt and discursive struggles and resistances nationally and at the country’s premier University.

NULASA led overt resistance against the Military regime with the slogan, Unchain the Nation! Restore Democracy Now!! It appealed to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for support and calling on foreign governments, Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs), institutions of higher learning, public bodies and “all people of goodwill to support our call that the GOL should immediately repeal the NUL (Amendment) Order 1989”.
The NUL (Amendment) Order (No. 19) of 1992 and the ‘Devaluation’ of the Academic Rank

During the era of the Military regime, one of the most burning issues for NULASA, for which it evidently fought tooth and nail, was the ruling by Council in 1985 that, Statute 24 was inconsistent with the principal law by defining senior administrative and senior library staff as academic. Council intended to synchronise this with the Principal Act. However, NULASA was against this ruling and felt that this move by Council was calculated to undermine its representation on Council (NULASA Minutes, 1987).

Maybe it can be reasoned that, at the time, this definition suited NULASA and its constituent partners, as it allowed them to vote as a bloc and probably to deal with the excesses of power by either the University or the Government or both, what Spivak (1990) calls strategic essentialism.
Yet it can also be said that a ‘golden’ opportunity was missed by NULASA to address one of the issues that has contributed to uneasy divisions among the staff of the University to this day.

The risk of advancing group interests in a simplified and collectivised way, as NULASA did, played into the “hands of those whose essentialism is more powerful than their own” (Eide, 2010:76).
Thus strategic essentialism can function as a double-edged sword (Lee, 2014). It is my hypothesis that the essentialising strategy adopted by NULASA was the beginning of the ‘devaluation’ of the academic rank at NUL because the strategy played well into the hands of the state which saw a golden opportunity to undermine the academic rank for its own ends.

Yet it is important to note that the NUL (Amendment) Order (No. 19) of 1992 saw the return of dispersed and rhizomic power. Observers think that this was only possible because Major General Lekhanya had been replaced, in the coup of 1991, by Colonel P. Ramaema.
Unlike the previous military junta, the new Military Regime was committed to the restoration of civilian rule at the earliest possible opportunity. To demonstrate this commitment, among other things, the Military regime amended the NUL Principal Act by allowing “the NUL established under the 1976 Act [to be] preserved, continued in existence and constituted … as a body corporate” (NUL Calendar, 2006/07:401). The Order thus restored the 1976 University Act – lock, stock and barrel.

But as already alluded, the new law introduced a new, broad and controversial definition of academic staff. The Order simply clustered teaching and non-teaching senior administrative and senior library staff into this category.
It defined academic staff as “VC, PVC, the teaching and research staff, Senior Administrative Staff, Senior Library Staff, Documentalists and all other members appointed on academic terms of service” (NUL Order, 1989:400).

As a result, and through the agency of NULASA and the agency of the state, the academic rank was devalued or, in post-colonial discourse, ‘bastardised’. This was in sharp contrast to the 1976 Act which defined them as simply “VC, PVC and members of the teaching and research staff” (NUL Act, 1976:31).
NULASA thus became inadvertent participants in the devaluation of its own profession. Since the dawn of democracy in 1993, the new definition of ‘academic staff’ has been the site of many contestations and counter-contestations between the trade unions on one hand and between the trade unions and the University Administration.

The chapter has demonstrated, through specific examples and case studies, the nature of power and how that power was overtly and discursively contested during the era of government interference in University’s affairs.

It has demonstrated that the university, as an autonomous centre of power, sits very uncomfortably with the political class in a decolonising environment. Major public universities have often remained key sites for debate, critique and mobilisation on behalf of political change, especially, but not exclusively in the direction of democratisation and the resolution of conflicts.

Throughout the post-colonial era, universities have been simultaneously the best allies and the most dreaded challengers of state power. Universities in Africa have tended to be actors in politics, civil society and the public sphere.

This role has generally not been appreciated by those in power and whose view, according to Cheater (1991:205), is that the best way to silence university ‘dissidents’ is to “destroy universities as a necessary precondition to strengthening not only the state, but also those who, however temporarily, control the state”.

The paper has also demonstrated that repressive power, whether by the state or by individuals, has its own limits. Repressive state power by the BNP government and the Military regime was the chief reason for their collapse. In the 21st century, threats, extrajudicial killings, intimidations, muzzling of the press and systematically targeting those in the opposition and one’s imaginary enemies can only serve to embolden those being targeted.

While violence and instability can never be celebrated, sometimes such violence and instability creates conditions for change. Spivak (1988), while critical of imperialism’s discursive violence, speaks of an ‘enabling violence’ and of the persistent transformation of “conditions of impossibility into possibility”.

By Munyaradzi Mushonga

Insight

A wasted opportunity to reset

Published

7 hours ago

January 20, 2025

The Post

The year 2024 is behind us now. It was a year in which we were told Basotho were 200 years old as a nation. The facts tell us differently. If we follow them, Basotho nation was 204 years old in 2024. Also, if we follow the facts, Basotho nation was established in Botha Bothe, not Thaba Bosiu.

None of this may matter very much but it must be known. Botha Bothe has been denied its rightful place as a place where the Basotho nation was formed.

Like an older man who is fond of younger girls, or an older woman who is fond of younger boys, we reduced our age mainly in order to suit the significance that has been accorded Thaba Bosiu at the expense of Basotho’s other mountain fortresses — for example, Mount Moorosi and Botha Bothe Mountain.

They say history is written by the victors, and the powerful. Until our current social order changes, what the powerful consider to be the truth will remain as it was given to us in 2024 — that, as a nation we were 200 years old in 2024, and that the Basotho nation emerged at their one and only fortress, Thaba Bosiu.

This story had to remain this way because too much political and financial investment has gone into Thaba Bosiu, and we cannot afford to change stories about it.

This article is not about quibbling about how old we are as a nation, and where the Basotho nation was formed. Rather the article is about what we achieved in 2004 in our celebration of 200 years of our nationhood.

Out of lack of any interest, or out of lacking any ideas, our politicians kept mum about what they would like to see the nation achieve as part of our celebrations. So, justifiably, they can tell us to bugger off, if we ask them whether they have anything to show from the 2024 celebrations. We cannot bother them about what we achieved because they never made any promises.

In November, 2024, a friend was asked at a public seminar: What lessons have we learnt about Basotho pre-colonial political leadership during our 200th anniversary celebrations?

In response, he made one of the most brilliant statements that can be made about what happened in Lesotho during 2024. He said, in 2024 all we did was, on the one hand, to be nostalgic about the good old past where political leaders (i.e. chiefs) respected their followers, communities shared what they had, and, within communities, human security was guaranteed everyone.

On the other hand, we continued to treat one another the way we always do: we continued to employ socio-economic systems—and to practise policies—that are responsible for socio-economic inequality in Lesotho, where many families, including children, go to bed hungry every day.

One of the things we should have done to celebrate 2024 years of our existence as a nation was to re-consider our adoption of systems and policies that leave many Basotho poor and hungry.

For having done none of this, as a nation, we remain with serious problems that need to be stated repeatedly because it seems that those in power do not get to see them in reality.

Being given just the numbers of hungry families, and being told, with satisfaction, that they are falling, will always be meaningless when you meet a hungry woman with a child on her back, and holding another by the hand—as we do in our villages—asking for food, or money to buy food.

In official statistics, she may be a single case that does not change the fact that government is succeeding in the distribution of food aid. That is not the way she may see things.

To her, she and her children are not part of some percentage—20%, 10%, 15%, etc.—that government may not have reached. She and her children are 100%, and more. They are not 20% hungry; they are more than 100% hungry.

Neither did the killing, the rape and abuse of children and the elderly stop in 2024, nor did we take the celebration of our nationhood as an opportunity to think about how to stop all this.

We are a deeply unequal society with very unacceptable indicators of human security. Action to address the welfare of the most vulnerable sections of society—women, children, the elderly—remains terribly inadequate.

Their lot remains poverty, hunger and fear for their lives.

In our celebrations of 200 years of our nationhood, perhaps one of the things we should have done is to commit ourselves to the formulation of a socio-economic system that secures the welfare of the most vulnerable sections of society.

Insight

Down in the Dump: Conclusion

Published

2 months ago

December 2, 2024

The Post

I closed last week by recording the dreadful news that trashy Trump had been elected called to mind WB Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” This is the poem whose opening lines gave Chinua Achebe the phrase “things fall apart.”

Yeats observes “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

It was written in 1919 and controversially uses Christian imagery relating to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming to reflect on the atmosphere in Europe following the slaughter of the First World War and the devastating flu epidemic that followed this.

It also reflects on the Irish War of Independence against British rule.

In lines that I can now read as if applying to the recent American election, Yeats mourns: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

And then I can visualise Trump in the poem’s closing lines: “What rough beast is this, its hour come round at last, / Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Trump is certainly a rough beast and isn’t the choice of verb, slouching, just perfect? For a non-allegorical account of the threat posed by the Dump, I can’t do better than to quote (as I often do) that fine South African political journalist, Will Shoki. In his words: “Trump’s administration simply won’t care about Palestinians, about the DRC, about the Sudanese.

It will be indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden and the oppressed, who will be portrayed as weak and pathetic. And it will give carte blanche [that is, free rein] to despotism and tyranny everywhere.

Not even social media, that once revered third-space we associated with subversion and revolution in the first quarter of the 21st century can save us because Silicon Valley is in Trump’s back pocket.”

So what follows the triumph of the Dump? We can’t just sit down and moan and bemoan. In a more recent piece of hers than the one I quoted last week, Rebecca Solnit has observed: “Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want . . . We must lay up supplies of love, care, trust, community and resolve — so we may resist the storm.”

Katt Lissard tells me that on November 7th following the confirmation of the election result, in the daytime and well into the evening in Manhattan, New York, there was a large demonstration in support of the immigrants Trump despises.

And a recent piece by Natasha Lennard gives us courage in its title “The Answer to Trump’s Victory is Radical Action.”

So, my Basotho readers, how about the peaceful bearing of some placards in front of the US Embassy in Maseru? Because the Dump doesn’t like you guys and gals one little bit.

One last morsel. I had intended to end this piece with the above call to action, but can’t resist quoting the following comment from the New York Times of November 13th on Trump’s plans to appoint his ministers.

I’m not sure a satirical gibe was intended (the clue is in the repeated use of the word “defence”), but it made me guffaw nonetheless. “Trump will nominate Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host with no government experience, as his defence secretary. Hegseth has often defended Trump on TV.” You see, it’s all about the Dump.

Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.

Insight

A question of personal gain

Published

2 months ago

November 26, 2024

The Post

Recently, an audio recording featuring the distressed MP for Thaba-Bosiu Constituency, Joseph Malebaleba, circulated on social media. The MP appears to have spent a sleepless night, struggling with the situation in which he and his associates from the Revolution for Prosperity (RFP) party were denied a school feeding tender valued at M250 million per annum.

In 2022, Lesotho’s political landscape underwent a significant shift with the emergence of the RFP led by some of the country’s wealthiest individuals. Among them was Samuel Ntsokoane Matekane, arguably one of the richest people in Lesotho, who took the helm as the party’s leader and ultimately, the Prime Minister of Lesotho.

The RFP’s victory in the general election raised eyebrows, and their subsequent actions have sparked concerns about the motivations behind their involvement in politics.

In an interview with an American broadcasting network just after he won the elections, Matekane made a striking statement, proclaiming that he would run Lesotho exactly as he runs his business.

At first glance, many thought he was joking, but as time has shown, his words were far from an idle threat. In the business world, the primary goal is to maximize profits, and it appears that the RFP is adopting a similar approach to governance.

Behind the scenes, alarming developments have been unfolding. A communication from an RFP WhatsApp group revealed a disturbing request from the Minister of Communications, Nthati Moorosi, who asked if anyone in the group had a construction business and could inbox her.

This raises questions about the RFP’s focus on using government resources to benefit their own business interests.

The government has been embroiled in a series of scandals that have raised serious concerns about the ethical conduct of its officials. Recent reports have revealed shocking incidents of misuse of public funds and conflicts of interest among key government figures.

Over the past two years, the RFP has been accused of awarding government contracts to companies affiliated with their members, further solidifying concerns about their self-serving agenda. For instance, vehicles purchased for the police were allegedly sourced from suppliers connected to a Minister’s son and MP.

The MP for Peka, Mohopoli Monokoane, was found to have hijacked fertiliser intended to support impoverished farmers, diverting crucial resources away from those in need for personal gain.

Such actions not only betray the trust of the public but also have a direct impact on the livelihoods of vulnerable communities. Monokoane appeared before the courts of law this week.

While farmers voice their concerns regarding fertiliser shortages, it seems that Bishop Teboho Ramela of St. Paul African Apostolic Church, who is also a businessman, is allegedly involved in a corrupt deal concerning a M10 million fertilizer allocation, benefiting from connections with wealthy individuals in government.

The procurement of fertiliser appears to be mired in controversy; recall that the Minister of Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition, Thabo Mofosi, was also implicated in the M43 million tender.

The renovation of government buildings with elaborate lighting systems was contracted to a company owned by the son of an MP. The RFP’s enthusiasm for infrastructure development, specifically road construction and maintenance, is also tainted by self-interest, as they have companies capable of performing these tasks and supplying the necessary materials, such as asphalt.

Minister Moteane finds himself in a compromising situation regarding a lucrative M100 million airport tender that was awarded to his former company. Ministers have even gone so far as to award themselves ownership of diamond mines.

Meanwhile, the nation struggles with national identification and passport shortages, which according to my analysis the RFP seems hesitant to address until they can find a way to partner with an international company that will benefit their own interests.

The people of Lesotho are left wondering if their leaders are truly committed to serving the nation or simply lining their own pockets. As the RFP’s grip on power tightens, the consequences for Lesotho’s democracy and economy hang precariously in the balance.

It is imperative that citizens remain vigilant and demand transparency and accountability from their leaders, lest the nation slide further into an era of self-serving governance.

In conclusion, the RFP’s dominance has raised serious concerns about the motives behind their involvement in politics. The apparent prioritisation of personal profit over public welfare has sparked widespread disillusionment and mistrust among the population.

As Lesotho navigates this critical juncture, it is essential that its leaders are held accountable for their actions and that the nation’s best interests are placed above those of individuals.

Only through collective effort and a strong commitment to transparency and accountability can Lesotho ensure a brighter future for all its citizens.

Ramahooana Matlosa