Africa-Press – Lesotho. Major General Mokaloba was in his element as he narrated the plight of soldiers in Mozambique to the Public Accounts Committee (better known as Politicians Acting Concerned).
After telling the PAC about the hunger ravaging the soldiers, the Major General said our troops were fighting insurgents using “ancestors” of vehicles.
He said some of the sekorokoros were more than 40-years-old. As usual, you can always count on our politicians to ask so many questions but forget the crucial ones.
The MPs should have asked three simple questions. So what are our soldiers doing in Mozambique? Why did the army send the soldiers without resources to feed them?
Whose cars did they expect to use on the battlefield? Yeh, I have asked! Ideally, those questions should have been answered before the soldiers left Lesotho because they are the core issues of any operation.
Just simple whys and hows. You don’t launch a military operation without food and proper cars. Even nyatsis get mofao and bus fare. It has always been obvious that Lesotho could not afford to send soldiers to Mozambique.
It has neither the money nor the equipment to participate in a foreign war. Lesotho was not forced to fight in that war. No one would have punished us for admitting that we are too poor to be fighting a war.
The justification for staying out of that fight is simple. Everyone knows we cannot afford to feed our people and our military vehicles are sekorokoros.
We are generally broke. So why did we go there anyway? The answer is that our army likes to think it matters in the region. It’s a small and ill-equipped army with outsized ambitions. The politicians suffer the same delusion. This is a result of an exaggerated sense of self.
This is why Maj Gen Mokaloba told the PAC that the army is being forced to use “old and tired” weaponry because “our nation likes to benefit from us (soldiers) without giving anything in return”.
Muckraker fell off her chair when the general said we are not taking care of our “protector”. The truth is that the army has benefited more from us. Recent history says it’s them (soldiers) who have neglected us.
Remember how in 2009 a bunch of thugs entered the main barracks, stole an armoured vehicle and attacked the State House? Those thugs were a paramilitary group trained by a former junior army officer at a farm in South Africa.
Some of them didn’t even know they were being trained to invade a country. It’s possible many believed they were being trained to be security guards. Many were just Mozambican vagabonds but their evil operation almost succeeded.
Those who tell us of the heroic soldiers who eventually stopped the thugs at the State House gate and caught some of them want to start the story from the wrong end.
The issue is not that the thugs were stopped and some caught but that they managed to get into our biggest barracks and steal an armoured vehicle. The likes of ’Mamarame Matela would probably blame it all on the phuzamandla fed to our soldiers.
By the way, the only other attack at the State House was by our soldiers led by their army commander, Kmore, who pulled the middle finger on the prime minister who had told him to pack his Ha re eeng Thaba Tseka.
As Muckraker writes this, the Maseru Maximum Security Prison has more soldiers than thieves. The courts are busy trying to bring more than a dozen soldiers to justice.
Millions have been spent on judges and a prosecutor in the cases of the so-called “protectors” accused of murder, attempted murder, treason and arson.
If people full of phuzamandla had the energy to attack their own government, imagine what would have happened if they were full of meat, trout and spaghetti. Heele!
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