IN our lead story this week, we capture how a strike by nurses and doctors has paralysed Lesotho’s health delivery system.

At the centre of the chaos were grievances by health workers about delays by the government to pay their salaries.

Some claimed they had not been paid since March.

The government has responded by acknowledging the challenges, blaming it on what it says were “technical challenges” with its payment system.

That explanation has been deemed not good enough to placate an already disgruntled and angry workforce that has complained about poor working conditions and other hardships in the past.

At the time of writing last night, the national nurses association said the strike action is now over after the government began processing their salaries.

They are likely to be back at work starting today.

While disaster has been largely averted, we still think the government needs to carry out an honest post-mortem of the crisis in order to improve its systems.

One of the key lessons we hope the government has learnt is an urgent need to shake-up its communication style.

Two weeks after the strike began, Basotho were no wiser as to why the nurses were on strike.

The only explanation they got was that the nurses were on strike because they had not been paid. As to why this only affected nurses, out of the over 45 000 civil servants in Lesotho, no one seemed to know.

What the government failed to do was to offer a clear and concise explanation why its system was not processing the payments on time as it always did.

We know that systems are manned by people and the very same people had been operating the system for years.

Why was the system now in shambles?

What happened over the last two weeks is a vivid illustration of how a government or any institution for that matter ought not to communicate.

If the government led by Prime Minister Sam Matekane is to remain in touch with the people, it must sort out its communication systems. That will be key to restoring the people’s trust in its own government.

The second lesson is that government officials must be proactive in dealing with future crises of this nature.

We are pretty certain that this is not the last time that civil servants have run into problems of this nature.

We can guarantee that it will happen again.

When all is said and done, it is clear that this strike might have inflicted immense reputational damage on Matekane’s government which was swept into power on the back of grandiose promises to improve systems of governance.

Basotho voted the government on the back of promises that it will improve the lives of Basotho. And better healthcare was among some of these issues.

Now, nurses simply abandoned their workstations leaving pregnant women at the mercy of fate. We are hearing stories of horror in the villages of how some women were forced to give birth on their own.

The nurses claimed they had been incapacitated after the government failed to pay their salaries. We understand their anger and desperation.

It is our hope that the “technical challenges” – often a euphemism for incompetence – have now been resolved for good. That is critical if the government is to ensure that no Mosotho, no matter how poor, goes through the kind of hardships they had to go through in the last two weeks.

WHEN the obituary for the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) is eventually written, it will probably read as follows: Here lies a once great party brought to its knees by bitter internal wrangles.
Added to its cause of its demise would be a staggering failure by the leadership to manage disputes and plan effectively for succession.
The cause of the LCD’s demise can be traced to as far back as 12 years ago. It was then that a fierce succession battle between warring factions began.
The party failed to manage the wrangle, leading to a bitter split.

The feeling within the party at that time was that the then party leader, Pakalitha Mosisili, had overstayed in office and that he needed to relinquish power to a younger lieutenant to take the party forward.
When Mosisili could not take it anymore, he packed his bags and formed the Democratic Congress (DC). That departure delivered a mortal blow to the LCD from which it has never recovered.
While Mothetjoa Metsing is a generally affable character, he comes nowhere close to the charisma of Mosisili, a leader who was generally credited with crafting pro-poor policies such as old age pensions and free primary school education.

In fact, Mosisili was seen as “the darling of the rural masses” for years. He was the glue that held the LCD together.
The defection this week of senior LCD officials, led by ousted secretary general Teboho Sekata, would seem to have delivered yet another telling blow against the once great party.
Coupled with its shambolic performance in last October’s general election where the party failed to win a single constituency seat, it would seem the LCD has lost its aura and is now on its knees.
Basotho no longer see the party as a viable alternative on the market-place of ideas.

It is now seen as a lethargic, clueless entity that is out of touch with voters’ needs.
Metsing, mortally damaged by allegations of sleaze, is seen as yesterday’s man. The party has lost its oomph and it will take a miracle for it to make any real gains in the next election in 2027.
If the LCD is to make itself relevant again, it will need to overhaul its leadership structures and re-invent itself. That is a big ask.

Having been at the helm for over a decade, Metsing should consider passing the baton to a younger, much more energetic leader to take the party forward.

It would be sad if Metsing, like other “big men” in Lesotho politics, seeks to hold on to power beyond his current term. We have seen that happen in other political parties in Lesotho. The results have not always been good.
A living example is that of Monyane Moleleki at the Alliance of Democrats (AD). He had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the leadership chair at the AD. Such humiliation was totally unwarranted.
If Metsing wants to avoid a similar fate, he must start a magnanimous process of grooming a successor and handing over power to a successor.

Chances of the LCD winning back power alone are almost zilch. The best it can hope for is to come in as a coalition partner or continue to act as a strong opposition party. The new government, led by Prime Minister Sam Matekane needs a strong opposition to keep it in check.
That is why it is critical that there is rejuvenation in the LCD so that we do not have a strong ruling party that begins to act as a “one party state”.

THE issues raised by the Democratic Congress (DC) Youth League over the manner in which the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) ran last October’s general elections merit close attention.

The temptation would be to dismiss these concerns as the rambling of a group of overzealous party youths still smarting from last year’s election defeat.

However, a close reading of their letter which the youth league wrote to the IEC this week would suggest they are genuinely concerned about the integrity of the elections and the future of democracy in Lesotho.

The DC’s National Executive Committee has since added its voice that it will boycott November’s local government elections unless the IEC apologises for its misdemeanours in last October’s election.

The statement by the youth league comes amid allegations that the DC has not fully come to terms with its devastating loss in last October’s general elections.

The occasional jabs at Prime Minister Sam Matekane and his government would seem to support such an assertion.

After reading the letter, it is quite clear that DC and its youth league feel genuinely aggrieved by how the IEC ran last year’s elections. It is quite a sober statement, free from emotion.

Apart from a simple apology from the IEC, the DC youth league is demanding transparency in how elections are run in Lesotho so that they do not produce contested outcomes in future.

That to us, is a fair demand.

The DC says a large section of their supporters were disenfranchised after their names were “transferred to different voting locations without their knowledge” while others were transferred to entirely different constituencies.

The party feels that these administrative errors were so huge as to tilt the electoral outcome and affect the integrity of the entire electoral process.

The DC Youth League is also not happy with how the IEC blundered when it allocated Proportional Representation (PR) seats.

Yet in spite of all the errors, what appears to have miffed the DC youths is the apparent lack of remorse by the IEC. It says the Commission has not bothered to apologise to the political parties and Basotho following the mistakes.

If it fails to apologise the League says it will conclude that the “current IEC has no interest in holding free and fair elections” and “will request (its) removal from office on the grounds of incompetence before the Local Government elections are declared”.

In the interests of democracy and political stability, it would only be fair that the IEC robustly engages political parties in Lesotho.
Where there have been mistakes, the Commission must address these so that it retains the trust of all political players. Trust is a key tenet of any electoral process.

It would be unfortunate if political parties were to lose their confidence in the IEC as the adjudicating authority on elections in Lesotho.

We however do not subscribe to the thinking that the IEC was out to manipulate the election results in favour of any single political party. We also do not think there was any gerrymandering of constituencies to engineer a predetermined election result.

What we saw after the October elections appeared to be genuine technical errors by the IEC. In any case, such genuine errors need to be acknowledged promptly so that there is no suspicion that the electoral body was in bed with any of the key parties that contested the elections.