Africa-Press – Lesotho. Late on the afternoon of Saturday May 27, 2023, one of us had a visitor in the person of a woman in her late 30s. She was begging for food, and was almost losing her mind from hunger.
She had a baby on her back who, the woman said, was two months old. The baby was crying incessantly. The mother said it was crying because it was hungry, and it had not eaten the whole day because her breasts had no milk.
On one hand she had a plastic bag into which she was collecting empty aluminium cans to sell to recyclers. This is an example of daily encounters and experiences for people who live in villages and suburbs, and who have no personal bodyguards to keep, or scare, hungry people away.
Two days earlier, two local weekly newspapers carried contrasting headlines; “New perks for Ministers and MPs Challenged”, read a headline in one newspaper and “Job losses shock Lesotho Labour Council” in another.
Note that the second headline pointed to trade union leaders, not MPs or government, as the ones who are worried about job losses and the consequent increase and deepening of poverty that Basotho face.
The first headline could have simply been written “Lesotho MPs ladle themselves with further increases in their perks. ” The second could have been written “Poverty deepens in Lesotho as more Basotho lose jobs and join many already wading in poverty.
To form one headline, the two could have been written “Lesotho MPs ladle themselves with more perks as more Basotho lose jobs, and poverty increases and deepens in the rest of society.
The disappointment of many Basotho must be that these costly practices of MPs’ self-enrichment are continuing under the watch, and clearly with support, of a government led by the Revolution for Prosperity (RFP).
Basotho voted for the RFP in October last year because the party’s leaders promised to stop longstanding practices by Lesotho MPs to treat public money as a trough from which they can feed with total abandon while, around them, the rest of Basotho are suffering from extreme poverty, chronic unemployment has reached crisis proportions, especially among the youth, crime and insecurity are rampant, public institutions are collapsing because of underfunding, and public education and health services on which needy Basotho depend are failing.
As we write, doctors from public hospitals have stopped working after hours because their call allowances have not been paid for over three years. This means those seeking doctors’ attention at night cannot be helped. Students at the NUL have stopped writing examinations because the government is not able to pay their allowances.
The question has to be asked: what are MPs rewarding themselves for if as a result of their failure to arrest decline in the economy job losses are reported weekly, the poor face even more hardships daily as prices of basic goods are increasing unchecked in our free market economy and killings and social insecurity are increasing daily?
The truth is that, even without these increases in their perks, Lesotho’s MPs are the best paid public servants in the country. Monthly salaries of Senators and Members of the National Assembly are M38 711 and M40 548, respectively.
Add to this their other incomes from public funds that MPs have shielded away from tax in ways that are undemocratic, anti-social, ethically bankrupt, and lack any morality.
Per latest increase of MPs’ perks, their tax-free income amounts to M11 000 Even as MPs shield some of their income from tax, nobody in Lesotho parliament or government, has found it proper to protect the poor in Lesotho from rising prices and to protect them from tax on basic necessities.
The diversion of public funds away public services and institutions, and towards personal enrichment of MPs has left poor Basotho with nowhere to go to when they and their children are sick; when they want good public education for their children and when they need protection from criminals, and protection from MPs’ self-enrichment at public cost.
Most people are not prepared to accept, as RFP-led government’s justification for the latest round of increases to MPs’ perks, the statement that they have inherited and seemingly must doggedly implement, costly and destructive decisions and arrangements of previous governments.
In the last elections, parties including the RFP did not present to the electorate a list of practices that they would inherit and stubbornly cling to if they were elected. Basotho voted for change that they promised. Not an increase in the inequality between publicly well-paid MPs and the incomeless rest of society.
In any case, all MPs and other politicians know how Basotho hate benefits that MPs ladle themselves with all the time; and they know how strongly Basotho are opposed to MPs’ acts of self-enrichment in the face of increasing and deepening poverty among the rest of society.
Typically, just when wealthy Britain’s ruling monarch’s wife is shedding positions such as ladies-in-waiting for reasons including cost, in our poor Kingdom the government is maintaining or introducing feudal positions such as gentleman-in-waiting and spiritedly defending their maintenance or introduction including retention of a staff of 36 for the Prime Minister paid by taxpayers.
We would like to join those who have already condemned the insensitivity and utter contempt towards Basotho that Lesotho MPs continue to show by further enriching themselves while the poor look on in their suffering and misery and women are losing their minds because of hunger and cannot produce milk to suckle their babies.
We commend and pledge our support to members of the RFP who have been brave enough to stand up against their leaders in government. We commend and pledge our support to, also, MPs Rakuoane and Mojapela, for challenging this latest act of self-enrichment.
We hope they have ideas of where to turn next because, as they must be aware, moving a motion in Parliament against increases in MPs’ perks is the same thing as going to a thokolosi’s owners to lay charges against the creature. As has always been the case, Lesotho MPs are at their quietest at moments like this, when the Executive present them with more and increased perks.
https://www.thepost.co.ls/mps-self-enrichment-scheme-must-be-challenged/
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