When Lesotho adopted the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system, it did not merely adjust a technical rulebook. It unsettled a political culture that had, for decades, mistaken exclusion for stability and dominance for legitimacy. Lekhetho Rakuoane was right to describe this shift as an electoral earthquake. Not because it was sudden, but because it altered the fault lines beneath our democracy.
Electoral reform in Lesotho did not arise from academic curiosity or donor fashion. It emerged from crisis. From elections that produced grotesque distortions between votes cast and seats won. From a system that repeatedly delivered parliaments painted in a single colour after campaigns that had promised rainbows. In 1993, a party secured three quarters of the popular vote and every seat in parliament. In 1998, just over half the electorate translated into almost total legislative control. These outcomes were legal under First Past the Post, but they were politically explosive. They bred suspicion, delegitimised institutions, and pushed losing parties to the edge of the constitutional order.
MMP was therefore not a luxury. It was an act of democratic self-preservation.
At its core, the reform attempted something deceptively simple: to inject proportionality into a majoritarian culture without abandoning constituency representation. To borrow Rakuoane’s framing, it sought to strike two birds with one stone. Accountability through constituencies on the one hand, inclusion through proportional representation on the other. In theory, the elegance of the compromise is compelling. In practice, it has been deeply unsettling.
The ordinary voter was suddenly asked to cast two votes on two ballots bearing the same party symbols. The same candidates could lose in the constituency and re-enter parliament through party lists. Constituencies could be represented by multiple MPs of different political persuasions. To many, this looked like political madness. To others, it was democratic justice finally catching up with arithmetic.
This confusion was not incidental. It was structural. MMP is not intuitive, especially in societies long accustomed to winner-takes-all logic. And Lesotho adopted one of the most complex variants of the system: no fixed threshold, closed party lists, double candidacy, and two distinct categories of Members of Parliament. These design choices carried consequences that political elites were either unwilling or unable to explain honestly to the electorate.
Political parties sit at the centre of this tension. Under First Past the Post, Lesotho drifted toward a two-party logic, but without the discipline such systems assume. Floor-crossing, splintering, and elite manipulation flourished. Ironically, the same critics who now fear that proportionality encourages fragmentation must still explain why the most dramatic party splits occurred under the old system. Electoral rules do not create political virtue. They merely shape incentives. And in Lesotho, the incentives of exclusion proved far more destabilising than those of inclusion.
Yet MMP has not delivered all it promised. Closed party lists, controlled by party executives, have weakened the link between voters and proportional representatives. Candidates elevated through lists often arrive in parliament without a clear constituency, and too often without accountability. The democratic potential of party lists to promote women, professionals, and marginalised voices has been squandered. With few exceptions, parties failed to produce genuine rainbow lists. Gender representation barely improved. A historic opportunity was missed, not because the system forbade it, but because political leadership lacked the courage to use it.
This failure has fed a dangerous narrative: that proportional representation is inherently illegitimate, that PR MPs are somehow less authentic than constituency MPs, and that MMP was imposed without popular consent. These claims are often made selectively. The same actors who praise the system as a guarantor of peace when speaking to international audiences will denounce it domestically when it constrains their dominance. Such double standards do more damage to democratic legitimacy than any technical feature of MMP.
The deeper problem, as Rakuoane observed, is that MMP was operationalised faster than it was legitimised. Voters were mobilised to deliver seats, but not educated to understand power. Parties benefited from inclusion without investing in political explanation. Parliament accommodated two categories of MPs without treating them as equals. The result is a system that works mechanically, but not yet culturally.
And yet, the alternative is far worse. The greatest danger of an electoral system is not complexity. It is hopelessness. When opposition parties and their supporters believe they have no plausible route to representation, democracy itself becomes fragile. Lesotho learned this lesson painfully in the aftermath of the 1998 elections. MMP restored something essential: the belief that losing does not mean exclusion, and that participation is not futile.
The earthquake, then, is not over. Its tremors are still being felt in party structures, parliamentary practice, and public understanding. Whether it ultimately strengthens or weakens Lesotho’s democracy depends less on the formula itself than on the political maturity brought to it. Electoral systems cannot substitute for leadership, but they can constrain its worst instincts.
MMP gave Lesotho a chance to align power with votes, diversity with representation, and competition with peace. That chance has not been fully taken. But it has not been lost either. The question now is whether the country chooses to complete the democratic transition it began, or retreat into nostalgia for a system that delivered certainty at the cost of legitimacy.
Earthquakes reshape landscapes. They do not guarantee better architecture. That remains a political choice.
