When a Speaker of the National Assembly suggests that democracy is somehow in competition with bread, it is time for the editorial page to respond. Democracy does not fail people. The failure to build democratic institutions that work is what leaves people hungry.
There is a phrase making rounds in parliamentary circles on this continent, and it arrived in Maseru last week from the lips of the Speaker of Lesotho’s National Assembly, the Right Honourable Tlohang Sekhamane. Speaking at the CSPOC2026 gathering, Speaker Sekhamane declared that people eat bread, not democracy, and urged Parliament to concern itself with democracy’s ability to deliver food, services and economic growth.
The sentiment sounds reasonable. It is, in fact, a false choice dressed in the language of pragmatism, and it deserves a firm, considered response.
The argument misreads history
The claim that democracy and material wellbeing are separable, or worse, that one must be deprioritised in favour of the other, is not a new idea. It has been advanced, with varying degrees of sincerity, by every government that has wished to defer accountability. It was the logic of one-party developmentalist states across post-independence Africa. It was the justification offered for military governments that promised order and delivery in exchange for rights. The record is not ambiguous: those arrangements did not, as a class, feed people better. They enriched smaller groups of people, more efficiently, with less scrutiny.
Lesotho itself carries this memory. The institutions built painstakingly since 1993 exist precisely because the alternative was tried and found wanting.
“Parliament is the supplier of democracy,” the Speaker said. We agree. Which is precisely why Parliament must never suggest that the product it supplies is a luxury item citizens cannot yet afford.
Democracy is the mechanism, not the obstacle
There is a genuine and legitimate concern buried inside the Speaker’s remarks, and we do not dismiss it entirely. Parliaments that debate endlessly while water systems fail, while clinics run without medicines, while young people emigrate in search of futures their own country cannot offer, are parliaments that have lost their purpose. That critique lands.
But the solution to a Parliament that does not deliver is not less democracy. It is better democracy. It is a Parliament that uses its oversight powers more aggressively, that holds the executive to account on public finance, that scrutinises infrastructure contracts, that calls ministers to answer when promised water projects stall and budgeted clinics are never built. The problem Speaker Sekhamane describes is a problem of democratic under-performance, not democratic excess.
The research literature on this point is not contested among serious scholars. Democracies, on average, outperform autocracies on long-run human development metrics. They manage famines less catastrophically. They are more likely to respond to citizen pressure on service delivery. They create the legal and institutional environment in which investment, including the kind Lesotho urgently needs, can take root with confidence. None of this means democracy is sufficient. It means it is necessary.
The danger of the framing
Words from the Speaker’s chair carry institutional weight. When the presiding officer of the National Assembly, the custodian of the chamber that is constitutionally the foundation of the democratic order, publicly frames democracy as something that must earn its keep by delivering bread, the implication travels further than the conference hall.
It travels to the executive, where it can be read as a signal that Parliament itself is prepared to be more flexible about rights and process if results are promised in return. It travels to citizens, who may begin to believe that their representatives regard their political rights as negotiable. It travels to the international community, at a moment when Lesotho’s governance record is under closer scrutiny than it has been in years.
This newspaper does not suggest that Speaker Sekhamane intends any of those readings. We take his concern for citizen welfare at face value. The point is that the framing, however well-intentioned, opens doors that are very difficult to close once they have been opened.
What Parliament should do
If the Speaker is frustrated, as we suspect he is, with a democratic system that produces elections but not electricity, debates but not development, then the answer lies within the institution he leads. Strengthen the Public Accounts Committee. Enforce attendance and participation requirements. Demand that the executive tables implementation reports on every budget line. Create a parliamentary budget office with independent analytical capacity. Bring constituency service obligations into law. Make Parliament legible to the people it represents.
These are democratic instruments. They are also, precisely, the tools by which bread gets delivered.
The Lesotho Tribune has, since its founding, regarded a free parliament and a free press as the twin conditions under which everything else this country needs becomes achievable. We will not waver on that position. We say to Speaker Sekhamane, respectfully and directly: defend democracy, reform its institutions, and the bread will follow. Abandon it in pursuit of the bread, and you will find, as others have found before, that you end up with neither.
By the Editor · Lesotho Tribune
