The lessons from Lesotho

RECENTLY, against the run of play, a new party led by a political rookie shocked the establishment by winning the most votes in the general election in Lesotho. According to the final results published by the country’s electoral umpire, the Lesotho Independent Electoral Commission (LIEC), the Revolution for Prosperity, a party formed only six months ago by the business mogul Sam Matekane, won 56 out of the 120 seats in parliament. Although the result fell short of securing a parliamentary majority and the RFP will now require the support of other parties to govern in something that has become the norm in the last decade, it is still significant that it upended expectations as the ruling party, the All Basotho Convention (ABC), which has governed the country of 2.14 million people since 2017, won only eight seats while the major opposition party, the Democratic Congress (DC) led by Mathibeli Mokhothu, only managed to come a distant second to RFP in the election, winning 29 seats. The remaining seats were shared by the smaller parties.

Lesotho’s richest man, Matekane, proprietor of a string of business ventures, including diamond mining and agriculture, cast himself as a champion of the people and the business community during the campaigns, and now faces an uphill task to turn around the fortunes of the southern African country operating a constitutional monarchy and  about a third of its 2.1 million people living on less than $1.90 a day. To be sure, Nigeria’s political elite aren’t exactly unaware of the development in Lesotho, and in Kenya and Zambia where the major power brokers have also had to contend with new realities. For instance, a  former presidential aspirant on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adamu Garba, recently warned his party not to underrate the Labour Party (LP) and its supporters in the 2023 presidential election. According to him, Lesotho’s youth contributed to the victory of the new party, and the APC must devise tactical campaign techniques to win next year’s election.

There are obvious lessons that Nigerians must learn from the Lesotho parliamentary elections. The first, apparently, is the power that a determined electorate holds in shaping the outcome of elections. Over the years, politicians relying on the monetisation of elections, which itself is a product of their astute weaponisation of poverty and manipulation of the electorate, have taken the people for granted.  Ideally, the people should be able to change their leaders if they are not performing, but that has not really been the case in the country. Bad leaders, relying on their parties’ so-called structures, have been rewarded for their ineptitude at all levels of government, and the country has been the worse for it. If anything, the lack of consequences for poor and visionless leadership has further emboldened Nigerian politicians to treat public office as their private property, see the people more or less as mere chattel, and treat public finances like private ventures. Conviction for corruption, in the rare cases where they were actually made, have been undercut by state pardons granted with the convicts’ projected roles in the next round of elections in mind, meaning that it is useless for the people to expect any change of tactics among public officeholders.

Nonetheless, it would be unwise to ignore the important and significant lessons that the RFP’s victory in Lesotho has for all students of democratic elections and especially for Nigeria and Nigerians. It is becoming increasingly clearer across the world that, through improvement in technology and growing awareness on the part of voters and the people generally, votes do indeed count and that voters can actually use their votes to send bad leaders packing. It would seem that gone are the days when politicians sought to fraudulently keep themselves in power by rigging elections.  Nigerian politicians must learn from the experiences in other places, including in African countries, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to win elections without having the true support of voters and the people by serving them well while in office.

Taking the people for granted and seeking to retain power through fraudulent elections may not likely work anymore as the people are becoming more adept at casting their votes and policing the votes cast to ensure that they deliver the intended results. Elections are the framework for the people to determine and control those they want in leadership positions and it is hoped that the coming elections in Nigeria will follow in this track to ensure, just as it has been demonstrated in Lesotho, that votes do count and lead to the election of desired candidates.