Coalitions, reform and stabilisation: lessons from Lesotho

Lesotho’s new government has the opportunity to implement long-delayed reforms, laying the basis for investor confidence, economic growth and development

The new government says it will pass the reforms bill within its first 100 days in office

Lesotho’s fourth inconclusive parliamentary election, held in October, presents new hope for political stability after the volatile coalition politics of the past decade.

The election was a fierce but peaceful contest between the four main political parties. Two of them — the All Basotho Convention (ABC) and the Democratic Congress (DC) — have dominated the political scene for about a decade and were coalition partners from 2020 to the day of the polls.

The other two were the Basotho Action Party (BAP), which split from the ABC in 2021, and the Revolution for Prosperity (RFP), formed by prominent Basotho businessmen hardly seven months before the election.

The results surprised many observers and even the victorious RFP, which emerged with close to 50% of the vote. Since 2002, national elections have been conducted under the mixed member proportional system, in which 80 seats are constituency-based and the remaining 40 are contested under proportional representation. The RFP won 56 out of 80 constituency seats but fell short by five seats to have 61 out of 120 seats. This would have given the new party an outright majority to form a government on its own.

Instead, it had to form a coalition. It embarked on a 65-seat coalition government, with the Alliance of Democrats (AD) contributing five seats and the Movement for Economic Change (MEC) four.

The once dominant ABC, which had 51 seats after the 2017 polls, lost all constituency seats and won just eight under the proportional representation component. The DC got 29 seats (18 constituency-based and 11 proportional representation seats), a threeseat increase from the last election. The BAP, also a new party, secured six proportional representation seats.

With this outcome, Lesotho has a chance to implement long-awaited and crucial constitutional and institutional reforms to build political stability, peace and national unity. Since 2014, when political instability and security crises resurfaced, governments have paid lip service to the reforms, prompting intervention by the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) and other external actors.

The thrust of what became known as the “reforms programme” is to depoliticise and strengthen weak public institutions — parliament, the judiciary, the public service and security agencies. The reforms are intended to remove excessive appointive powers from the prime minister and spread these to institutions created for that purpose. Past prime ministers have appointed almost all heads of key public institutions on the basis of alignment to their political parties, without any form of process or criteria. This triggered polarisation and instability within and between security institutions, in particular, and in the political system as a whole.

The post-2017 election coalition of the ABC, AD, Basotho National Party (BNP), and the Reformed Congress of Lesotho (RCL) started the reforms programme by establishing an all-inclusive body — the National Reforms Authority (NRA) — composed of all 35 political parties registered with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), and 19 representatives of social formations.

The NRA developed constitutional and legislative proposals to be passed into law by parliament. The government collapsed, however, before completing the reforms programme. The collapse was due to factional feuds within the ABC. One faction of the ABC (to be joined later by the other) formed a new coalition with the DC, the MEC, the Popular Front for Democracy and the BNP in May 2020.

Motivated by the desire to maintain the status quo that allows politicians to continue patronage, cronyism and favouritism in the public sector, this coalition sluggishly continued with the reforms programme and demonstrated no desire to complete it.

In April this year, the NRA submitted a constitutional amendment bill to the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, which sat on the bill until the second week of July. When it began work on the bill, it rejected many proposals that constituted the thrust of the reforms, but it could not finish the process before parliament’s dissolution on July 14.

Under pressure from Sadc and Lesotho’s development partners, the government recalled the dissolved parliament by invoking the country’s state of emergency constitutional provision. The recalled parliament continued to consider the reforms bill, but again rejected crucial provisions that were the essence of the reforms initiative.

Fortunately for the country’s stability, one civil society activist challenged the constitutionality of the decision to recall parliament, arguing that there was no state of emergency to warrant the move. The courts ruled in his favour, effectively stalling the reforms programme and leaving Lesotho under the same instability-prone conditions.

The post-2022 election conditions now favour the new government to complete the reform process and lay the basis for political stability. The government has reiterated its commitment to passing the reforms bill within its first 100 days in office. Whether it will deliver on this promise is yet to be seen.

The leader of the RFP and many of the party’s MPs are new to politics and they have no baggage of being beholden to anybody desperate for government positions. They claim that they joined politics to fix the country by completing the reforms programme, depoliticising the public sector and introducing the principle of meritocracy in public sector recruitment and promotions processes, eliminating wastage of public resources and uprooting corruption.

They have already made one of the most politically difficult decisions — reducing the size of the executive from 36 (26 ministers and nine deputy ministers) to 15. This renders the government potentially fragile as some RFP MPs who are not appointed to the cabinet may cross the floor and collapse the government, as happened after the 2012 election. This is a potential and immediate threat to the government.

Unlike those who came before them, the RFP leader and key members of his executive are wealthy businesspeople and may pass the reforms bill to ensure that stability is restored so their businesses can thrive. Because it has 56 parliamentary seats and its coalition partners are small, the RFP has more leverage than any other party that has led coalitions.

Its next challenge will be to secure the twothirds majority required to pass constitutional bills. It will have to lobby the opposition for support.

The pressure from the development partners on the government to pass the bill may not relent. Overall, there are good prospects for the restoration of political stability, investor confidence, economic growth and development.

Kapa is associate professor of political science at the National University of Lesotho. He is the author of a chapter in the Mistra publication ‘Marriages of Inconvenience: the Politics of Coalitions in South Africa’, published in 2021