Cape Town — Lesotho is set for peaceful elections on February 17 and a smooth counting process afterwards, but the crucial test will be the electorate's response to the outcome, the head of a civil society monitoring group said in an interview from Maseru.
Denis Kadima, executive director of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, told allAfrica that the institute's 17-strong monitoring team –headed by Sir Ketumile Masire, former president of Botswana – had surveyed a sample of voting districts and found them logistically prepared for the election. The difficulty of getting ballot papers to remote mountain villages had been overcome with the help of three helicopters sent by the South African Air Force.
The election, scheduled for May, was called early after veteran politician Tom Thabane led 18 members of parliament out of the ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) and formed a new party, the All Basotho Convention.
Kadima said the calling of a "snap election" had initially given rise to concerns about the voters' roll. There had been cases where people held voters' cards but their names were not on the roll. However, Lesotho's Independent Electoral Commission had issued a revised voters' list in January and the election observers would focus on checking whether voters with cards were turned away from polling stations.
The electoral commission has seven days in which to announce a result, Kadima said, but expected to do so within three or four days. This would constitute the greatest challenge, he said. Given experience in past elections, if the ruling party won by a landslide "security might be jeopardized" by suspicions of vote-rigging. However, if the balloting reflected "some kind of balance," the potential for a violent rejection of the result would be decreased.
Lesotho has had a turbulent political history since the Basotho Congress Party annulled elections in 1970 when it became apparent it might lose power. Democracy was restored in 1993 but a disputed election result in 1998 led to violent protests and a military intervention by South Africa and Botswana. The last election, in 2002, was conducted peacefully.
