19 February 2007
Cape Town — Civil society monitors from southern Africa have declared that Lesotho's elections allowed the Basotho people to express their will freely, in spite of problems with voters rolls and media coverage.
A mission from the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, led by Sir Ketumile Masire, former president of Botswana, issued an interim statement on the elections on Monday. The mission included representatives of electoral commissions, civil society organisations and academic institutions from Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The mission noted that ahead of the elections, Lesotho faced "an increase in suspected politically motivated killings and assassination attempts which created insecurity within the nation..."
It questioned the government's decision to call a "snap" election without first checking on the state of readiness of the country's Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), and for allowing key preparations to take place during the Christmas holiday season.
Voter registration lists, released on Christmas Day, indicated they had not been regularly updated. "The IEC subsequently undertook to repair and revise the electoral list," the mission said. "However the final lists still contained imperfections and some voters went to vote without the voters’ cards, and although the commission distributed these on Election Day, not all the voters signed for the cards collected and this could be open to abuse."
The mission reported that most parties felt "that access to the media, particularly the public media, was inadequate and that the government was abusing the media to gain an unfair advantage over other political parties." This was critical, because only publicly-controlled media penetrated outlying districts.
"However," the mission added, "the parties did concede that in the last three weeks of campaigning the national public media had responded to their complaints and the coverage had improved, although it was still not fully satisfactory."
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