MASERU – Retired South African judge and Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) facilitator for Lesotho Justice Dikgang Moseneke has expressed satisfaction on the national reforms progress thus far.
Justice Moseneke was in Lesotho with his team from Tuesday this week, scheduled to leave on Thursday.
As part of his itinerary on Wednesday he paid a courtesy call to His Majesty King Letsie III, and later met Prime Minister Moeketsi Majoro, the National Reforms Authority (NRA) Executive, political leaders, civil society and church leaders among others.
His meeting with the opposition did not materialize and is expected to be on Thursday prior his departure.
Speaking to the media on the sidelines as there was no press briefing arranged, Moseneke said he was encouraged and delighted with the reforms process.
“We are getting to the zenith, we have done extremely well and we are delighted and happy that the National Reforms Authority has prepared so many pieces of legislation that amount to constitutional reforms, legislative reforms and governance reforms. We have been assured that these will be put together in an omnibus bill, one big law that contains many laws, to be introduced to parliament, processed and shown to Basotho,” Justice Moseneke said.
“There will be work after the bills have been introduced in parliament, debate, discussion and adoption. And we should not forget that our main aim is to have all these adopted before the upcoming elections which shall have to be held under the new law.” he said.
Lesotho ‘s elections have been scheduled for September 2022.
Justice Moseneke further said, “That is why this is a very important step of our journey and the second thing is that we should be able to report to SADC which is sitting in two weeks time from now and the obvious question from the other countries around the region will be “where are Basotho? How far are they with the reforms?” and we should be able to report and say these are the things that Basotho would like to change and those will be in black and white for everyone to see and that is what we’ll have to hold out to SADC.
“We must remember that SADC is going through a very difficult time itself, with Swaziland and Mozambique and so on, so the question becomes quite important as to what is happening in Lesotho and the developments here because this is a success story and it’s a story that therefore should relieve them over time of intense facilitation and scrutiny, and therefore a saving of resources,” concluded Moseneke.
He said when he first came to Lesotho there was a military contingent because peace was shaky and some people were in exile and couldn’t come into the country for all sorts of reasons.
In conclusion, he said they encouraged talks around the Peace and Reconciliation Bill and were delighted that the NRA has “started a peace architecture discussion and Basotho will have to look in the mirror and decide how far back they want to go.”
