Lesotho has held five coalition governments in a decade, yet not one has collapsed over a policy disagreement. Our politics is consumed by personality, survival, and the scramble for position. That is not debate. It is noise. And noise is expensive.
Ask yourself a simple question: what is the governing coalition’s position on youth unemployment? Not the slogan, not the press release headline, not the minister’s talking point at a donor conference. The actual, argued, contested position. The one that was tested against an alternative and survived the scrutiny of parliamentary debate. You will struggle to find it. That is the problem.
Lesotho has cycled through five coalition governments since 2012. Every one of them collapsed. Not one of them fell because two parties disagreed over how to address the country’s 33 percent unemployment rate, or whether the national curriculum was producing graduates the economy could absorb, or what the government’s long-term plan for water revenue actually was. They fell because of who got which ministry, which faction controlled which security appointment, and which politician calculated that the arithmetic of the moment favoured a new arrangement. These are not policy disagreements. They are disputes about access. And there is a fundamental difference between the two.
Policy disagreement requires that the parties involved have policies in the first place. In Lesotho’s political landscape, this is not reliably the case. More than fifty parties contested the 2022 general elections. The majority did not have ideologically distinguishable platforms. The Revolution for Prosperity entered the race six months before polling day and won 56 parliamentary seats. Its founder, Sam Matekane, was a businessman, not a career politician. The voters who backed the RFP were not endorsing a programme of government. They were expressing exhaustion with the parties that had preceded it. That exhaustion is legitimate. But exhaustion is not a policy alternative. And a parliament full of exhausted voters’ proxies, with no common analytical framework and no tradition of adversarial policy argument, cannot produce the quality of debate the country needs.
A parliament that argues only about who leads it has no energy left for the question of where it is going.
The Bertelsmann Transformation Index’s 2026 Lesotho country report recorded what it called a persistent disconnect between democratic ideals and the delivery of governance, noting that voter dissatisfaction with political leadership runs deep. That dissatisfaction is rational. Citizens who watch their parliament spend months litigating the constitutionality of a no-confidence vote rather than debating the education budget are not being apathetic. They are making a reasonable assessment that the institution is not performing its core function. A 2024 Afrobarometer survey found that 69 percent of Basotho believe their members of parliament rarely heed public concerns. When nearly seven in ten citizens have disengaged from the expectation of parliamentary responsiveness, the country is operating without one of the basic mechanisms of democratic accountability.
The quality of public discourse outside parliament is not noticeably better. Lesotho’s media landscape is one of the most constrained in the region. The country has no daily newspaper. Most of its 26 radio stations depend on government advertising revenue, which creates structural incentives against editorial challenge. The Computer Crimes and Cyber Security Bill, reinstated in 2023 and revised in 2024, contains provisions that critics from MISA to Freedom House have described as capable of criminalising legitimate expression, with a section that could imprison someone for up to seven years for disclosing information about a cyber security investigation without lawful excuse. These are not the conditions that produce a culture of rigorous, fearless public argument. Political violence has compounded the chill. In June 2025, an activist was arrested after posting a video criticising the Prime Minister’s unfulfilled commitments. These incidents do not happen in a vacuum. They signal to the citizenry what the ceiling on criticism is, and people adjust their behaviour accordingly.
The consequences of thin debate are not abstract. They are visible in the specific decisions that go unmade, the problems that persist without ever being named precisely enough to be addressed. Lesotho’s airport has been in a state of near-collapse for years, lurching from one failed tender to the next, with ICAO threatening closure as recently as 2020. The country’s 11 percent debt servicing burden, flagged by the UN Secretary-General in his December 2024 address to parliament, consumes resources that could fund the education and infrastructure the economy needs. The garment sector, which employs tens of thousands, was absorbing the shock of US tariff decisions in 2025 with no publicly aired industrial strategy to cushion the blow or plan the pivot. These are not governance failures that appeared without warning. They are the accumulated result of years of political energy directed at coalition arithmetic rather than at the work of government.
Civil society organisations, the natural counterweight to executive inertia, are treated by governing parties as threats rather than partners. The EU-supported civil society evaluation published in early 2026 found that CSOs are marginalised in political debates and that public discourse in Lesotho presents a hostile and disabling environment for organisations trying to hold government to account.
There is a temptation to blame the electoral system, and the system does deserve criticism. Mixed-member proportional representation, which Lesotho adopted in 2002, was intended to produce more representative parliaments. Instead, it has produced parliaments in which the party list mechanism gives party leaders enormous power over who enters the legislature and who does not. Members who might otherwise hold the executive to account on policy grounds have structural incentives to remain loyal to their party principals. The system is not the only explanation, but it is part of one.
There is also a temptation to reach for historical explanation, to trace the poverty of debate back to the coup years, to the army’s long habit of resolving political questions by force rather than argument, to the culture of deference to authority that coexists uncomfortably with the Basotho tradition of community dialogue and collective decision-making in the pitso. The pitso is not a myth. It is a genuine institutional inheritance. But it has not been translated into a modern parliamentary culture that asks hard questions of those who claim to govern in the public interest. That translation is still waiting to happen.
What would better debate actually look like? It would look like a budget process where the opposition has genuinely interrogated the assumptions behind the revenue projections and said so publicly, in detail, with an alternative. It would look like a parliamentary committee on education that has received testimony from teachers, economists, and employers, weighed the evidence, and produced a report that differs from the government’s position on at least one substantive point. It would look like a civil society sector that is funded independently enough to challenge the government without fearing that the next cycle of state advertising will dry up. It would look like a media that can report on the army’s conduct during Operation Hard Fist without a journalist calculating whether that article is worth the personal risk.
None of this requires a new constitution or a different electoral system, though both would help. It requires a political culture that has decided, collectively, that the country’s real problems are more interesting than the personalities of the people who fail to solve them. Lesotho has no shortage of intelligent, educated, motivated citizens. It has a shortage of institutions and incentives that put their intelligence to work on the country’s actual challenges, in public, in ways that can be challenged and improved.
King Moshoeshoe I built a nation by choosing dialogue over conflict, as the UN Secretary-General reminded parliament in December 2024. That is not a piece of heritage tourism. It is a standing instruction. The question is whether the parliament that sits in his name is capable of honouring it.
