Lesotho is capable of many things. But no country beats us when it comes to raising the standards of incompetence.
You think you have seen the worst of the worst but someone somewhere will be cooking a stinker of ineptness that will leave you agog. There is always someone sweating to push the frontiers of mediocrity.
After being showered with praises for running a decent election, the IEC could not take the accolades anymore.
They were obviously bitter that they had failed to mess up the election with their shoddy voters’ roll. They were itching to show the world that they are the masters of bungling.
So they hurriedly organised a brainstorming meeting on how to prove that their good management of the election was an accident they deeply regretted.
In that meeting, the IEC and representatives of the 65 political parties stumbled upon a brilliant idea to mess up the election and pee on all the good work they had done.
They contrived to miscalculate the allocation of Proportional Representation (PR) seats.
The decision to screw up was unanimous. So the DC was allocated three more seats than it deserved. The AD was pelted with five seats instead of four.
Pessy-Pessy, who was still scratching his bums after being spanked by an RFP candidate in Mokhotlong, was denied a seat.
The IEC and the representatives of political parties then trooped out of the meeting and told the nation, without a jolt of shame, that they had the correct allocation of PR seats.
It took them more than a week to come back to their senses and have the courage to correct themselves. They rushed to court to stop the opening of parliament until they corrected their blunder.
Reading their court papers, you would be forgiven for thinking that they were drafted a day after the election. They had the guts to tell the court that the case was urgent.
We are now being told that this was an innocent error and there was no malice intended.
Yet that is not the crux of the matter. The issue is that a whole electoral commission could not interpret an electoral Act written 20 years ago.
This is the same law the IEC has been using to get funding from the government.
The same law has made it possible for everyone at the IEC, from the chairperson of the commission to the messenger, to be paid. It is the very reason why the IEC exists yet we are now being told that the whole commission misinterpreted it when it came to the allocation of PR seats.
They don’t misread laws when it comes to their per diems, salaries and benefits.
Missing from this show is a profuse apology from the IEC.
Their senior management has been perambulating radio stations to disperse blame instead of embracing the mistake and showing sincere contrition.
They reluctantly admit that they made a mistake but insinuate that the representatives of political parties who endorsed the allocation should also have picked the mistake.
Holy dung!
You can bet your last coin that everyone at the IEC will keep their job and pretend that this boob was just a slight misplacement of seats.
Muckraker will not be surprised because that is how we roll in this country.
Nothing is to be gained from demanding that people who got the PR allocation maths wrong should lose their jobs when civil servants who lined their pockets with state funds are still welded to their chairs in government offices. Phew!
Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuuuu!
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