Unless you have the brain of a mouse, you should be on cloud nine right now. You should feel proud to be a Mosotho. At least we now have a leader who will have us assume our pride of place among nations. Ntate Sam could just be the leader who shall take us to the promised land. Let’s all support him. From the look of things, he is not only a man of vision, he is a doer. This perhaps is the main advantage of having a proven and successful entrepreneur as leader. Who among our career politicians would have delivered that very incisive inauguration speech with a clear 20 point agenda of what needs to be done within specific timelines? Think of Kabi, Machesetsa, Mapesela, or the leader of something called the White Horse party or the African Arch party? Zilch.
Ntate Sam’s inauguration speech was lucid. It was crisp. It was spot on. It was uplifting. There is now hope after all in his Majesty’s Majestic Kingdom. Ntate Sam has ably demonstrated the traits of good leadership. Listening to him on Friday, I was left in no doubt that Lesotho has now opened a new chapter towards progress. We have finally plugged a missing link.
Ntate Sam did particularly well in listening to all my good advice for him to come up with a clear 100 day plan. He will do well if he keeps listening to me. He will do well as long as our honeymoon period persists.
One trait of a good leader is decisiveness. By issuing specific timelines for specific deliverables, Ntate Sam has fulfilled this crucial trait. By devising a clear plan and agenda to respond to the national crisis he is inheriting, he has fulfilled another key leadership trait.
Of his 20 point plan, I eagerly await the report of the stolen M6,2 billion. I hope the thieves of a third of the country’s national budget will end up where they belong, in Tlali Kamoli’s prison yard.
Also important is the report on payments to long suffering businesses. At least there is hope for businesses now. Anyone anyone who has suffered the ignominy of having been a supplier to Moeketsi Majoro’s useless, inept and vile regime, can now expect to get paid. That’s a positive development . It would never have happened under Majoro. All the best Ntate Sam, you are our only hope. If you had not won, I had planned to migrate to South Sudan.
And to you Ntate Majoro, people are angry
….You are a hoax
Poor Ntate Moeketsi Majoro. The man can only feel sorry for himself. If his tenure was not so disastrous, Scrutator would also have felt sorry for him. But I won’t. The rotund man got what he deserved. Ntate Majoro has been the biggest disaster this country has ever experienced; tone deaf, aloof and wholly incompetent.
Basotho were right in booing and degrading you in front of the whole world Ntate Majoro. Readers of this column will know how much I supported you when you were inaugurated as prime minister in May 2020. I had hoped you would have been an improvement. It turns out that even Lady Dee was a better prime minister than you.
No one could have ever predicted you could be so bad. After all you claimed to hold a PHD. I now suspect it’s from the University of Pyongyang. Your 30 months in office simply makes for a tale better forgotten than told.
You have left Lesotho in paralysis. As the incompetence of your regime took a toll and the suffering of the masses got worse by each day you remained in office, you seemed not to care. That’s why Basotho were right to boo you.
You are not a leader Ntate Majoro. You are a hoax. You never had a plan to resolve Lesotho’s problems. You were a prime minister just for the sake of it. Basotho had no option but to vent their anger on you. Your speech was nonsensical in every realm. Did you honestly expect Basotho to listen and clap for you, when you have left so much mayhem. What did you expect from all those hungry faces in that Setsoto Stadium. Did you expect them to ululate a man whose only achievement has been to worsen their plight.
Those saying Ntate Sam should have restrained Basotho from booing you are equally wrong. They are the elites, who from the Stadium, went straight back into their lives of caviar, parsley and Cognac. They have little or no appreciation of the suffering of the hungry masses.
Among your greatest failures Ntate Majoro was your general aloofness and insensitivity to the plight of your fellow citizens. It’s unfair to compare you to Thabo Mbeki. Ntate Mbeki was often berated for his aloofness. But he at least did good for his people. He oversaw a period of unprecedented economic growth in South Africa. He improved the livelihoods of millions, ensuring the poor in South Africa got social grants, access to electricity, clean water and hygiene.
You Ntate Majoro did nothing for Basotho. If you had accomplished one significant thing, Basotho would not have booed you. But because you have nothing to show for your 30 months in office, they gave you what you deserved.
Even as Lesotho lurched from one crisis to another, you elected to shut yourself down in your office and do nothing. A real leader leaves his pooch to engage his people in times of crisis. But not with you Ntate Majoro. The only time you ever spoke to Basotho was when Cyril Ramaphosa convened his family meetings during the Covid lockdowns. You would then plagiarise his speeches and foist Ramaphosa’s inhibitions on us.
You never talked to Basotho about the scourge of gender based violence and the general criminality that took root under your leadership. Unlike Ramaphosa, you never came to the aid of businesses stricken by Covid-19. You never had a plan to improve the economy.
You never engaged businesses on why your government was not paying them despite those billions you received from the IMF. I don’t know how many times my colleagues tried to get clarification from your equally inept and supremely unqualified finance minister Thabo Sophonea on how you deployed windfall from the IMF. Sophonea simply ignored all calls to him. That is the hallmark of an accountable government. Yours was not only unaccountable, it was incompetent, corrupt, useless.
It takes a heart of stone for a leader to simply ignore her auditor general when she reports that M6,2 billion has been stolen from state coffers. Does this means you were part of this grand theft auto, Ntate Majoro. Time will tell.
I am sorry I am not going to wish you well for the future. I had so many expectation of you. But you disappointed.
Your final act as premier on splurging millions from treasury on first class tickets for you and your wife to gallivant at funerals around the world was hurtful. Only our King should have represented Lesotho at these events. Not you and your bulky entourage. But such was the extent of your insensitivity.
To add peri-peri to injury, you made sure your wife donned the best (if not strangest) hairstyle for the inauguration. How much of the missing M6,2 billion did you devote to that exotic blue cut?
Let me close by saying, I am very happy that we have seen the back of you Ntate Majoro. Many thanks for your incompetence. In the end, it is what gave rise to Moruo. For a party that has only existed for six months to win elections, it only means the existing leader was particularly appalling. Giving us Moruo was your only achievement.
Now you can enjoy your retirement Ntate Majoro. It seems from the first day you got into office, you began the countdown to your pension.
You should however not be allowed to hold public office again. And when the report of the missing M6,2 billion comes, I hope you, your former finance minister and any fellow looters join Kamoli down there.
Ache!!!
