Lesotho’s elections have been declared fair, but a host of inconsistencies points towards vote rigging, writes William Boot in Maseru
The day before Lesotho’s general elections last Saturday, Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) leader Pakaditha Mosisili stuck his neck out to predict: “We will win by a landslide.”
He said this at a time when analysts, journalists and observers alike were saying the polls would be closely contested. The best guess around was that the LCD would indeed garner the highest number of votes. But it was doubtful they would gain an absolute majority.
This opened up the intriguing possibility of a coalition between the other two major parties, the Basotho National Party (BNP) and the Basotholand Congress Party (BCP) – sworn enemies in the past – to cobble together a government for the next five years.
In the event, Mosisili was more than vindicated. His ruling LCD fell only one seat short of a complete electoral whitewash: it won in 78 of the 79 constituencies, nearly all of them with margins of thousands.
There were some obvious reasons why the LCD could have outperformed initial expectations: the granting just before elections of a 10% pay rise to civil servants; the appearance on election day of supervising policemen in brand-new uniforms; most notably the promise of R850- million (from a gross national product barely five times that) to Lesotho’s farmers if the LCD was returned to power – the usual rabbits that governing parties tend to pull out of the hat around election time.
But there could be more to it than that. In the bitter aftermath of the elections, opposition parties have banded together to call for the annulment of the election results and to accuse the LCD of massive electoral fraud.
And in Lesotho itself, the mood is ugly, with opposition party leaders barely able to restrain their supporters from resorting to violence. Evidence is emerging to suggest the opposition could have a case.
Even prior to the elections, BNP leader Evaristus (ER) Sekhonyana took the precaution of employing a team of South African forensic consultants, from the firm OF&A in Durban, to scrutinise the provisional voters’ roll.
Though initially Lesotho’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) appeared reluctant to allow opposition parties sight of the lists – though electoral law specifies that such scrutiny must be allowed – eventually the BNP was allowed to buy the relevant diskettes.
What the consultants found, by sampling six of the constituencies, was that Lesotho’s voter population is – apparently implausibly – unique in its composition.
For instance, the voters’ roll suggests that eight times as many people are born on the first of January in Lesotho than on other days of the year. Similar anomalies were uncovered in connection with certain other dates, among them the second of the second month, the third of the third month, and so on.
What precisely the significance is of such anomalies remains unclear, but for the consultants they sounded alarm bells: “It is unnatural for these births to be concentrated in such a way; it falls totally outside the normal distribution … we are 95% sure that the births on these days are not statistically reliable.”
The oddities uncovered do not end here. The consultants also noted that fully 10% of the voter population was duly accredited by IEC officials without providing any date of birth whatever.
In some cases a voter registered without a date of birth was grouped together with another voter (sometimes more than one) bearing exactly (or almost exactly) the same name – but this time with the date of birth specified.
Given the fact that Lesotho does not issue identity books and that the elections relied entirely on the good offices of the IEC in registering voters, such peculiarities could point to double, triple and even quadruple registration of individual voters.
Many of the missing dates of birth are of apparently relatively young voters born in the 1970s, when Lesotho already had a reliable registry of births and deaths.
Some of this information was made available to the IEC on May 16, before the elections were held, and formed the basis of a supreme court application seeking to have the elections postponed.
The court, however, found that while there were indeed irregularities, they did not appear to be sufficiently widespread to seriously influence the result – and that the elections should go ahead as scheduled.
In deciding this the court flew in the face of no fewer than three sworn expert testimonies, without evidence being led to rebut them.
The BNP supported the findings of the OF&A consultancy, with corroborating opinion by professors from the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of South Africa.
It also appeared that control over voter registration papers was less than watertight. After the voter registration period had expired, a load of blank registration forms was discovered abandoned in the Leribe district – who put them there and why still remains unclear.
Some opinion has it that the forms were planted by opposition parties to support their case for the postponement of the elections, though other analysts think the abandoned forms represent the thin edge of a huge wedge of electoral fraud.
But if there was election rigging, it was certainly not uncovered by groups of international observers from both the Commonwealth and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
Both groups certified the election process as having gone off without major problems, and though the Commonwealth observers were somewhat guarded in their wording, the SADC emphatically declared the elections free and fair, and commended the people and political parties of Lesotho for their political maturity.
This was despite the fact that, as the observers freely admitted, their observations had been confined to voting and counting, and no study had been made of possible irregularities in the registration process.
Indeed, the SADC group’s official representative happily confirmed that he had not even consulted the records of the postponement case brought before the supreme court only weeks earlier.
But even within their perceived brief, the observers could not be everywhere at every given time, and they seemed to gloss over some apparently serious potentials for voting irregularities.
For instance, there have been numerous reports that, at least in some constituencies, the ink used to mark the fingers of members of the electorate who had already voted was far from indelible.
In Leribe, for example, ordinary stamp-pad ink was used to dip the forefinger. In other instances voters were apparently able to remove the stain with nothing more hi-tech than saliva.
Moreover, in at least one constituency ballot boxes were opened before being returned to the IEC for certification. The incident has apparently led to the calling of a by- election in the district in question.
Opposition parties are looking for a lot more, though, than just by- elections. They want a total annulment of the election results, and both the BCP and the BNP have announced they will be looking to the courts for satisfaction.
How such court action will play out remains unclear. Meanwhile, a perhaps more immediate threat to Lesotho’s governing LCD could be coming from across the border.
It’s an increasingly open secret that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)has lost patience with successively corrupt governments in Lesotho and has its own plans for the tiny monarchy. In 1996, Cosatu took a secret decision to work towards the unification of both Lesotho and Swaziland with South Africa by extra-parliamentary means.
Representing as it does the nearly 100 000 Basotho mineworkers still employed on South Africa’s mines (who still account for the lion’s share of the total economy) and the more than 50 000 already retrenched in recent years, Cosatu may well be in a position to call the shots, not only through satellite unions inside Lesotho, but also by flexing its not-inconsiderable muscle inside South Africa.
Some analysts are even predicting that the apparent rigging of the Lesotho poll could be the last straw that breaks the pony’s back, and brings tiny Lesotho into South Africa as its 10th province – hardly the outcome that the LCD poll strategists had in mind.