Africa-Press – Lesotho. OPPOSITION parties have threatened to lobby the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to deny Lesotho any financial assistance in the form of loans and grants.
The parties were reacting to Finance Minister Dr Moeketsi Majoro’s claim last Thursday that government is broke. At a press conference yesterday the parties said Majoro’s claims are baseless unless he can show how his government “misused” the public funds.
The Democratic Congress (DC), Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) and Popular Front for Democracy (PFD) said it was hard to believe Majoro’s claim that the government is broke.
The LCD spokesman Apesi Ratšele said Majoro’s claim was surprising because “only just two months ago parliament allocated M13.2 billion for this financial year’s budget”. Ratšele said when Pakalitha Mosisili’s government left office in June last year there was about M3.5 billion in the public purse.
The opposition said they suspected that the government depleted the funds in “what is called the ’Maesaia Thabane Trust Fund, an abyss in which government ministries are forced to take the money into”.
They also blamed what they called the expensive wedding ceremony of the Prime Minister and the First Lady, which they said dipped into the public coffers.
The opposition also alleged that the birthday ceremonies of the Prime Minister and the First Lady were financed from the public treasury. thepost has not seen any evidence to support the opposition’s claims that the Fund and the events were funded by the government.
The parties said the government continues to pay ambassadors who were not working in their assigned missions. They also pointed at the two commissioners for the Lesotho Correctional Service (LCS) to illustrate that the government is spending recklessly.
They said the government also had two deputy ministers and two principal secretaries at the Ministry of Health
The Ministry of Public Works also has two principal secretaries, the opposition said.
“Now that the Finance Minister says there are no funds it is wise to also tell us how the funds were spent, especially because there were no capital projects in the past financial year,” Ratšele said.
“He also has to explain what was done with (unused) funds that were returned from the ministries,” he said.
“According to our estimates, at least M10 billion is supposed to be available to accomplish developments for this financial year.
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But government spokesman Nthakeng Selinyane said Majoro’s claims were informed by data from the Central Bank of Lesotho (CBL).
“If anybody knows any better they should come up with their own statistics,” Selinyane said. Statistics don’t lie.
If anybody thinks statistics lie then they should bring their own statistics that don’t lie,” he said. “We know better that this government inherited a burden of the budget deficit.
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Selinyane said it is unable to finance its proposed spending for the current financial year. He said the IMF will not listen to the opposition unless they lobby parties in the government.
