Something deeply unsettling is happening inside the Lesotho Electricity Company. Three of the company’s top engineers are suspended, and sources insist the administration wants all of them gone on what look like flimsy and politically motivated charges. If that is true, then the board of directors is dragging the country into a crisis they do not appear to understand.
LEC is not an ordinary state entity where political appointees can bluff their way through decisions. It is an engineering company. It runs on technical knowledge, lived experience and competence that cannot be replaced by slogans about reform or quick staff reshuffles. Removing engineers who carry decades of specialised skills is not only short sighted. It is negligence that borders on self sabotage.
An engineering company behaving like a political playground
If these suspensions are an attempt to purge people rather than solve problems, then the board is showing that it does not appreciate what actually keeps the lights on. The people now being pushed aside are the same ones who understand which feeders fail in winter, which substations need constant balancing, which transformers misbehave after storms and which regional power partners respond fastest during emergencies. Not everything in a utility is written in neat policy documents. Much of it lives in the heads of the engineers who have held LEC together under difficult conditions.
Treating such people as disposable is the clearest sign of incompetence at governance level.
Institutional memory is walking out the door
Corporate governance principles emphasise the value of institutional memory. When long serving technical staff leave, the company loses more than workers. It loses intelligence accumulated over years. It loses insights that guide planning, troubleshooting and crisis response. It loses consistency in decision making.
New recruits may arrive with fresh qualifications, but they will not have the instinctive understanding of LEC’s grid that comes from living through faults, cable theft, transformer failures, wet season overloads or emergency imports from Eskom and EDM. That kind of understanding cannot be replaced quickly. Sometimes it takes years to build and sometimes it never returns once lost.
Relationships with Eskom and EDM will suffer
The public often forgets that LEC does not operate alone. The utility relies heavily on its relationships with Eskom in South Africa and Mozambique’s EDM. These relationships depend on trust and familiarity. They depend on knowing who picks up the phone, who can speak confidently about system stability and who has the authority to negotiate emergency supply or grid adjustments.
When senior engineers who hold these relationships are removed suddenly, it raises questions. It makes foreign partners wonder whether LEC is stable or whether it has been captured by internal politics. LEC has already been criticised for questionable procurement decisions and weak oversight. This is not the time to send another signal of instability.
What this means for Basotho
Electricity is not a political game. It is felt in homes, in businesses, in clinics and in farms. When engineers are fired on weak grounds, the risk of system instability rises. Outages last longer. Repairs take more time. Businesses lose stock. Pumps stop working. Emergency calls take longer to resolve.
A responsible board would understand this. A responsible minister would step in before the situation spirals into full crisis.
What should happen now
The board should stop this reckless path and commission an independent technical review. The engineers facing suspension deserve due process. Their knowledge should be protected rather than purged. External partners like Eskom and EDM should be reassured, in clear and honest terms, that LEC remains guided by expertise and not by factional motives.
If this does not happen, then the country must prepare for a darker and more expensive future. An electricity utility does not survive long when competence is sacrificed for politics. And Basotho will carry the cost for decisions made by people who refuse to listen to those who actually understand the system.
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