A peek into the age of politial advisors, reconciliators and spokespersons in govt

(This is the first instalment in a two-part series to be concluded in the next edition)

NTHEKENG PHEELLO SELINYANE

To many witty Basotho and outside observers, the high-speed, dribbling-wizard passage of this year’s salaries and benefits for parliamentarians and prime minister’s balooning staff of two bus loads represents simultaneously shrewd play of parliamentary rules and deep commitment to treachery.

When persons who have wickedly triumphed over others avoid revisitation of that affair, they arrogantly say: “The train has long left the station” or “That ship has sailed.” 

Indeed that ship is in the wide, wild, turbulent high seas now, with the passengers who others view as the looters drinking to what the losers see as a pyrrhic victory and bitterly wish them to perish en masse in a death in splendour a la the Titanic.

So what I propose to do here is not so much to look back at last week’s shenanigangs. Instead, I propose that we jovially ruminate over the turf that was contested here, which many saw as a citadel of rot while others worshipped it as their temple of splendour.

When I joined the civil service in May 1992, it was a very modest place where old men always in necktie and blazer took you by hand and guided you through the maze of public service ethic.

Civil servants went for induction at the Lesotho Institute of Public Administration (LIPA), Public Service Regulations were the Word of God, promotions were earned, furniture and stocks were modest, in adequate supply, and well cared for, and when it was necessary they were disposed of publicly and in accordance with existing regulations.

That was exactly one year to the first and last government of the Basutoland Congress Party (BCP), which won all constituencies in March 1993, after 23 years of no elections, including seven years under the military.

From the genesis of the BCP administration, there was no shortage of blanket threats to civil servants, who were taken en masse as offsprng of “MaNasi”, the popular trade name of the former ruling Basotho National Party (BNP), which name was pronounced with gusto that exuded precipitated hatred. Many were labelled another hunter’s dogs and told they would discharge themselves from the service by their manners.

Yet I would be lying to say I experienced that in the three short years I spent in the civil service. From my “shopfloor” all we heard was parliamentarians on radio endlessly churning what you could compare to thick industrial coal soot of taking potshots at the entire spectrum of the civil service, without an inkling of justification, each ending in the well rehearsed, cutomary  declamation:  “’Me hoo ke bobolu!” translating to, “And that, Mr Speaker, is corruption!”

Then the turning point came in early 1995. They came right up to my doorstep. All of them. The parliamentarians. That was through the commencement of the operations of the Lesotho Highlands Water Revenue Fund that went on to be notoriously known as “fatafato.”

I was woking as an economic planner and was assigned to operate as a one-person Secretariat servicing a Board chaired by my PS, the late Ntate Motlatsi Matekane, which awarded funds for labour-based public works projects on the electoral constituency basis, where the MPs, including ministers, were to be project coordinators receiving and disbursing public funds, assisted by their loyalists on the ground.

The stench of rot that flowed therefrom is now as legendary as it was foreseeable, from the outset, as the MPs simply chowed that money and nobody could do anything about it, and I will leave that one there.

As I received the key to my “fatofato” office, one legendary Motsoahae Thabane, alias Bro Tom, until now famed as a model career civil servant and shrewd political strategist, was receiving his key to the brand-new office of Special Political Advisor to the Prime Minister.

That prime minister was the mystical Ntsu Mokhehle, who was later to be forced to jump party ship and form the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) with one year left to his single term in office.

I had a few encounters with Bro Tom in his tenure here, since the prime minister was customarily the minister of the public service, and I had to knock on his door as the president of the Lesotho Union of Public Employees which was formally banned by the Public Service Act of 1995.

I remember how warmly he welcomed us, never denying us appointment, but never allowing us to see the prime minister either.

We would sit over biscuits and coffee while being made to think we were waiting for the prime minister to clear business on his desk, and return a few times until we gave up.

At one point he took a wanton shot at us on Radio Lesotho, which was the sole radio station nationally.

Throughout his tenure to 1998 he was the de facto spokesperson and  political combatant of the government, through the Radio Lesotho monopoly, and was arguably more frequent than any single guest on the sole phone-in talk show “Seboping” which is still continuing in  its age-old slot.

He was reportedly credited in diplomatic circles with bringing a semblance of statecraft to what some saw as a see-saw of stampede until his arrival and at party level he was credited with splitting the party by keeping the key to the fortress doors of access to the leader by the various factions contesting for his attention and annointment for succession, lack of which is widely blamed for the ultimate breakup of the juggernaut “movement”.

Thabane is widely draped with the robes of single-handedly fending off opposition onslaught on the nascent LCD, in which he became foreign minister,  in the  aftermath of the 1998 election uprising that left three towns in ashes.

His very public spat with the lynchpin finance minister and party legal wizard Kelebone Maope on “Seboping” signalled innerparty crisis before Maope’s 2001 departure to form Lesotho People’s Congress even before the completion of the transition to new electoral model’s 10-party parliament of 2002 and probably threw into sharp relief the urgency of removing him by the hawks.

He was upstaged by the hawkish duo of career ministers Mpho Malie and Monyane Moleleki, as witnessed in his defeat in standing for several posts at the party’s January 2006 elective conference and going on to establish his own All Basotho Convention (ABC) in October of that year, forcing the acrimonious snap election of February 2007.

This nearly spawned the first coalition government as the ruling party picked up a mere 51.6 percent of parliamentary seats; whereas the IEC also controversially apportioned 21 seats from other parties to the ruling party, pushing it to a commanding 69 percent.

How and why the excesses of “fatafato” came to pass under the nose of the stellar civil servant and governance guru that was Bro Tom who went on to be a star minister is anybody’s guess. How and why it came to be that his own party was befallen by the same fate as the BCP despite the obvious lessons under his tutelage should be a subject of a whole chapter in a book.

In his political prime he used to boast in rallies that not even Pakalitha Mosisili, who succeeded Mokhehle in party and government, understood Mokhehle like him.

It was also around this time that another squaring-the-circle creation sprouted out of nowhere – the Recinciliation Officers, who were the non-reintegrated and perhaps unrehabilitated members of the Lesotho Liberation Army.

There was nothing reconciling or recinciliatory about their very varied, very non-political, and very non-social but simply toiler functions.

It was a simple, casual throwing of crumbs at their feet by Mokhehle after first refusing in the 1990-92 transition and then failing after assuming incumbency to take care of his own and contriving a dignified nation-building compact; and they were selected on a continuation of bitter bias with some still left out in the cold and many going on to die in various pauper vocations,  joining disgruntled alternative politics like that of Maope’s breakaway party, and lately forming their own Basutoland Total Liberation Congress in 2019.

Randomly sprinkled across the civil service at the behest of the prime minister, and principally in the prime minister’s cluster of ministries and departments like the DMA, FMU, etc, when the last of them were retired in the third coalition government of 2017 and replaced by what became known as Community Development Support Officers.

Lesotho was as far from finding reconciliation as ever and as witnessed by the failed TJC law in the fourth coalition government of 2020, the subject was as controversial as ever.

When Bro Tom went to parliament and cabinet from 1998, his simultaneously envied and hated post wasn’t repeated in the three governments of Mosisili over the 14 years to 2012, until Thabane returned it in his first coalition givernment with the “renewed” LCD under Mothetjoa Metsing and the BNP under Thesele ‘Maseribane. The candidate was former veteran civil servant and UN Maseru top office , Sekhoyana Bereng, alias Babyface.

Here a variation of the pattern came to pass, where Deputy Prime Minster Mothetjoa Metsing also took former BCP/LCD career minister and retired secretary-general, Mpho Malie, as political advisor at large, still going about his various trades and not clocking at deputy premier’s offices.

Thabane also had a first in one Thabo Thakalekoala, long-time journalist who was party minutes writer, for a spokespesron sometimes called press attache, with a trademark of saying goverment was charging a tide of spittle of contempt at its supposed detractors, mainly opposition (“Muso o tšoela ka sehlethela sa mathe”) when he was at his best.

Back then I wrote that one could almost touch in the air the nation’s euphoria for the advent of the regime, the way it was thick. But just over one year into the honeymoon, inscrutable signs of weirdness loomed on the horizon, with the army commander suddenly travelling in menacing convoys, sometimes driving members of the public off the roads, followed by media reports of the deputy prime minister warning against the yet unannounced planned removal of top public executives, including commander, and vowing to defend them as children of the nation.

Babyface’s short stint was somewhat uneventful, prompting detractors to say he was brought in merely for his sense of dress, to help Bro Tom with purchasing his trademark berets and caps which loyalist ministers and senior officers had come to wear like altar boys of late. He was suddenly dropped in May 2014, one month short of two years on the job.

One newspaper and some radio stations reported that he was released because he failed to see that the LCD and Thabane’s bosom friend and minister in his office whom he had foisted on the party parliamentariy list while he was standing against the party in disregard of its constitution after losing primary elections, Molobeli Soulo, was plotting to overthrow him. 

City rumour mill said he failed to pick up the “Addis Abbaba” conspiracy, whereby it was alleged that then army commander, Tlali Kamoli, and Molobeli Soulo patched together a coup plot while on official business at the AU headquaters in January  2014.

Meanwhile at the same time back home the acting commander, Major General Khoantle Motšomotšo suspended Brigadier Maaparankoe Mahao for chiding a captain who assembled troops to prepare for resisting a rumoured removal of Kamoli, from where things just went south, galopping to Kamoli’s aborted August coup following a failed parliamentary vote of no confidence of that autumn and prorogation of that winter.

His replacement was the little known Samonyane Ntsekele, who had not travelled much in party politics or professionally but had just become secretary-general of Thabane’s party, and could thereby not keep his public service job.

It is difficult to garner what his footprints were here, but that was a turning point period that would certainly have needed the Tom Thabane of 1995.

The military-politics axis was fast precipitating between the now incarcerated commander Tlali Kamoli and Thabane’s first coalition partner Metsing. Metsing had also banded with his old leader Mosisli who had since broken away to form the Democratic Congress (DC) leaving him with a smaller party in a pact that finally left Thabane no option but a snap election of February 2015 to head off a parliamentary coup following the aborted military one.

On Ntsekele’s watch, Thabane failed to judge that he couldn’t go to elections with a miniskirt balance sheet, with little to show in the reversal of citizens’ hardships that had catapulted him to power.

It failed to take advantage of the votes of the pro-government Block parties which could have raised its majority to 58 percent from a skimpy 50.8 percent, and retain the support of the level headed faction of the LCD headed by the secretary-general Keketso Rantšo, to save government. 

If they were indeed committed to incarcerating Metsing for grand corruption of one form or another, as former police commissioner Khothatso Tšooana claimed at the Phumaphi Commission, while they could have given him a long rope and bought time for themselves to make traction in power with service delivery and conferment of human security, then the cost of the subsequent death of two army commanders and the events that triggered that  probe were far too high, given that they took up from where Metsing left off in their return to power in 2017.

On the other hand, Metsing’s advisor was an old suave mule, well steeped in the politics of brinkmanship, having managed the ruling party engime room under Mosisili during the drawnout friction over the 21 parly seats, and seen off SADC with a single letter without consequences amidst interminable mediation.

If Ntsekele’s legacy is somewhat too murky to discern distinctly here, we might benefit from casting his shadow longer into Thabane’s second coalition government of 2017-20, where he became the strategic water minister whereas intimate circles reported him spending more time at prime minister’s office than in his own ministerial suite down the road.

Perhaps he was reliving his nine-month sojourn in that office. Perhaps, as he was widely accused, he was living out the same portfolio without wearing its tag, being a de facto advisor, after the hawks shot down Thabane’s choice for the post. 

His singular association with the alienation of government from party, and capture of state by the prime minister’s trophy wife, with sometimes dire consequences in the two years leading to the party leadership elections of February 2019, led to his crushing defeat in his attempt at retaining the secretary-general seat.

His leading rejection of that election and year-long court battles led to the ultimate undoing of Thabane and his ignominious ejection via forced early retirement from government while controvesially holding on to party leadership.

Under the second coalition government of 2015-17, Prime Minister Mosisili had former LCD consultant, Fako Likoti, for political and ecocomic advisor, while Deputy Prime Minister Metsing had Lebesa Maloi, retired teacher and former Lesotho Evangelical Church’s schools secretary, being his minister in the first coalition who had just lost a comeback election contest.

In an unusual  turn, the prime minister took as his Senior Private Secretary (SPS) his deputy’s campaign spokesewoman, Mamello Morrison, while prime minister’s spokesperson was veteran broadcaster and former ABC parlimentariam, Motumi Ralejoe.

Likoti was a PhD holder and former political science lecturer and member of the 2007 IEC of the controversial 21 parliamentary seats. For a government that kicked off with the killing of an army commander and handing over upright armsmen of various ranks to the whims of a returning rogue commander only recently decommissioned with a trend of barenuckle defiance of civilian authority, it was to spend its short life defending all sorts of excesses and fending off outright onslaught of local civil society, the media, opposition, critical American source of economic lifelines, SADC and the world.

Here Likoti found himself putting out endless fires by churning out a barrage of stinging and ridiculing articles of high-sounding academia that essentially said civilian authority had no space in the affairs of the security forces in their shepherding of democracy and insurance of national security according to their own standards and principles; and that national sovereignty had to be respected by suprational inerveners in state human rights violations.

This was a maverick watershed where even the SPS in Mrs Morrison came out guns blazing, publicly pouring scorn on victim families and threatening withholding of state justice for their demanding accountability, while the prime minister’s spokerperson charged regular venom at oppsition leaders.

Morrison was a seasoned political dabbler, being former BBC correspondent, information minister in the 30-day king’s transitional council following his dissolution of Mokhehle’s government  in August 1994, and publisher of King Moshoeshoe II’s seminal speeches.

Not surprisingly, this military-politics pact was also a chariot of grand corruption where cabinet acted as a procurement unit in award of some contracts that broke the fragile unity of the coalition; which snapped in late 2016 with deputy DC leader Monyane Moleleki forming a new party and helping a March 2017 parliamrntary coup as he accused the prime minister of prioritising the LCD leader and DPM above him.