OWN CORRESPONDENT, Maseru | Sunday 7.30PM.
FOLLOWING lengthy talks with local Lesotho parties on Sunday, the South African Defence Minister Joe Modise said there is still some way to go to find a solution.
Modise flew to Lesotho following Friday night’s mutiny in the armed forces, where junior officers rounded up their seniors, among them army commander Lieutenant-General Makhula Mosakheng, and locked them in Maseru’s high-security jail.
Mosakheng later announcd on Radio Lesotho that he and 28 senior officers were resigning with immediate effect and that Brigadier Anthony Thibeli was replacing him as head of the army. Mosakheng’s statement appears to have been made under duress.
Modise dedicated most of Saturday to discussions with Mosakheng, Thibeli, and three junior officers who spearheaded the insurrection. He also met Prime Minister Pathakili Mosisili.
“We have set a process in motion that will calm the situation in Lesotho,” Modise said, without elaborating.
South African President Nelson Mandela, in Port Louis, Mauritius, for the Southern African Development Community summit, said the situation in Lesotho would not be on the summit agenda and that it would be a “waste of time” to discuss it as there was no crisis in the kingdom.
He also announced that the Langa commission report into electoral fraud will not be tabled at the SADC summit as originally planned.
A government official said that the SADC troika detailed to handle the Lesotho problem, which includes Mandela and presidents Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Festus Mogae of Botswana, already has the report and will discuss it in Mauritius, mainly focussing on the way forward for Lesotho.