MASERU – 

RUCKUS over whether national political reforms should be a priority is a sheer

waste of time, according to former Deputy Prime Minister Lesao Lehohla.
As if he is reading a line from 20th century Scottish reformist and journalist, Samuel Smiles,
Lehohla thinks mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils afflicting Lesotho.
Smiles posited that “there requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform” and
this is what Lehohla believes in albeit put in different words.
He believes that the spirit of Moshoeshoe-ism, of selfless nation building based on humanity
should prevail if Basotho are to realise true reform.
“In my opinion we need to reform ourselves instead of reforming the law,” he says.

“We do things in a wrong way and later blame the constitution saying it is faulty, saying it has not
worked,” he says.
“We have not allowed it to work. Do we want a constitution that is prescriptive of every statutory
position? Surely we don’t need the constitution to be that detailed.”
Lehohla says there are certain things that should not be done because of the respect for an
office one is holding even if the law is silent on them.
He says this is what is called abiding by the spirit of the law.

“We politicians often say what law does not stop it has allowed and as we say so we continue to
do wrongful things and later blame the constitution saying it is faulty.”
He says political reform is neither here nor there, what is important is to retrospect and cherish
our national unity as a heritage left to us by Moshoeshoe.
“We have not consolidated what we have. Who can deny that Moshoeshoe was a nation builder
and that all we have to do is to lean on what we found already built?”
“Why have we failed to consolidate what was already there?”

Lehohla says for aeons Basotho have had a false sense of security because they were
comfortable working in South Africa, developing it, and regarding their country as just a resting
place.
He says Basotho did not pay attention to the need to shape their nation the way they wanted it
but saw jobs in apartheid South Africa as a means to solve all their problems.

So, when the neighbouring country got political freedom and re-shifted its priorities, no longer
using Lesotho as its labour reserve, thousands of Basotho were stranded and with no home to
go to.
“We had a false sense of security when we were the excess labour for South Africa. We did not
build our own nation, building on what Moshoeshoe had left for us.”
Lehohla says he is particularly concerned about youth unemployment “especially when we have
put them through school at great expense”.
He says Basotho’s greatest challenge at independence was creating jobs for the population.

Government was until then the single largest employer in the country.
The excess labour was destined for employment with the goldfields in South Africa.
Everybody else was engaged in subsistence agriculture.

Clearly rain fed farming was increasingly getting too risky to be relied upon.
Much as irrigated agriculture is initially capital intensive but in the long run it pays dividends.

“I say this because most of our people are in the rural areas where they rely on subsistence
farming. All they need is to be empowered and enabled,” he says.
Lehohla regards land degradation and erosion as “serious enemies of the farmer and by
extension our national enemies threatening our food supply, habitat and environment”.
“We need to address these challenges head on in an integrated way. If it is a war that must be
won, we must put resources in there. This immediately translates into serious employment in the
rural areas where people are, people who do not necessarily want to leave their homes to live in
urban areas.”
He says that immediately stems the tide of rural poverty and helps to improve agricultural
productivity and the environment.
“What I am saying in short is get water, experts and requisite resources where people are and
encourage agro industries as a path way to diversify our industry in a sustainable way.”
Lehohla bemoans the gangs violence that has bedevilled his home district of Mafeteng –famo
and blanket wars that blemished the district.

“Incidentally a proper reading of the situation suggests to me it is no longer a Mafeteng

phenomenon in as much as it is engulfing the whole country and putting at risk law and order in
the country in view of the fact that it is encroaching into the whole body politic,” he says.
“I am not aware that law enforcement has been able to cope with these heinous crimes, putting
the perpetrators through the courts to account for their deeds. On the contrary one sees an
escalation of unbridled murders of our elderly parents.”

Lehohla says the erstwhile murders related to so-called litotoma (disused mines in South Africa)
are on the increase.
“Never in the history of Lesotho in living memory have we witnessed such brutality and cruelty of
Mosotho to Mosotho, it is simply unprecedented,” he says.
“What is most disturbing is the lethargy of law enforcement to deal effectively with this threat. The
firearms that seem to flood our country willy-nilly are the single largest threat to our security
sovereignty.”

To solve the problem, he says the country should pay more attention to job creation for the
youth.
He says he is happy to note the efforts of the NUL today in trying to train its graduates to be
creative and creators of employment rather than being seekers of employment on completion of
their studies.

He says industry and government should try and lend a helping hand to institutions that redirect
their curriculum to enable their graduates to be equipped to face contemporary challenges.
Son of a primary school teacher, also raised by a maternal uncle who was a high school teacher
in his late teens, Lehohla never thought he would be a politician.
With a smile, he recalls that he wanted to be a lawyer but because “I was good in mathematics
and sciences I chose a different career, where my strength was”.
Born in July 1946 in Mafeteng Lehohla is the second child in a family of six siblings, three boys
and three girls.

The eldest is the former Chief Justice of Lesotho, Mahapela Lehohla, the current chairman of the
Independent Electoral Commission.
The last born is a long time South Africa’s top statistician, Pali Lehohla.

After graduating from Harmony Primary School he went to the then Mafeteng Secondary School,
later renamed Bereng High School, where his love for mathematics and sciences was nurtured
and grew. For higher secondary education, he enrolled with the then Basutoland High School
(now Lesotho High School) after his mother’s death at the age of 52 in 1964.
Actually, it was his maternal uncle who had offered to take him in and lived with him in Maseru as
a teacher at the school.
It was at this school where he realised his potential as a mathematics student. He had been at a
school that did not have specialising teachers and sometimes they would go for days without a
teacher.

At this new school he had the benefit of being taught every day and he leveraged on that,
together with his friend with whom they were from Mafeteng Secondary.
In 1966 he enrolled with the University of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, as the
National University of Lesotho was then called.
That is where he was formally introduced to politics by peers.
There were the likes of former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s brother, Jama Mbeki,
former Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili and many others from around the SADC region.
“There were many students from South Africa,” he says, adding that these had fled apartheid in
their country.
Lehohla remembers vividly his first voting experience in 1970, and the eagerness he showed in
putting his Basutoland Congress Party (BCP) to power after it was defeated by Leabua
Jonathan’s Basotho National Party (BNP) in 1965.

“I and my friend were so eager to vote in our own constituencies that we decided to walk from
Roma to Mafeteng to vote,” he says.
They got a lift near Ha-’Mantšebo and managed to reach to Mafeteng on time.
The ballot counting started and at the time, already returned to the university campus, “we
refused to go to the classes and our ears were glued to the radios listening to the results”.
Lehohla said the BCP was ahead with several constituencies in urban and peri-urban and it was
clear to everybody that the BNP was losing.

“After the announcement of Thaba Moea results, the counting was never announced. Instead,
there was short announcement that we should wait for an important announcement,” he says.
When it finally came, Prime Minister Jonathan announced that there had been violence during
the election and that women were even raped and therefore the elections were annulled.
That was when the Prime Minister suspended the constitution and declared the state of
emergency.

Luckily, exams had already been written and the students were waiting for the results.
Lehohla says the students were not happy with the political status quo and wanted to march to
Maseru to protest against the government.
During those trying days, the police ransacked his house and when they saw his chemistry book
with illustrations of molecules on the cover, they said he was using it to learn how to make
bombs.
He was arrested and later thrown in the Maseru Maximum Security Prison for one year and six
months without any charges.

That was where he found the bulk of the BCP leadership including Ntsu Mokhehle and other
youths like Mosisili already incarcerated.
When they were finally released, he and Mosisili were given restriction orders not to go outside
Mafeteng.
Mosisili’s brother was a policeman working in Mafeteng and he had offered to keep him hence he
was not taken to Qacha’s Nek, his home town.

Lehohla said he had passed so well at school that the Wadham College Junior Common Room
at Oxford offered to pay for him to study at Oxford University and the British government put
Lesotho under immense pressure to release him.

Taking chances, undercover police tried to recruit him so that he could be their spy within the
BCP and when he declined they told him that the government would not facilitate his going to
Oxford. The British continued to put the government under pressure “and because they were
Lesotho’s main donors, finally the government released me”.
Lehohla graduated from Oxford with a Bachelor and Master of Arts.

Lehohla started teaching at Bereng High School in 1975 and was promoted to headmaster in
1977.
Lehohla remained as headmaster until 1993 when Lesotho regained democracy and he stood for
elections under the BCP flag and won a seat in parliament.