3.5 The Traditional Regime
3.5.3 Transition to Democracy
A paradigm shift of thinking about citizenship and democracy was brought about by the arrival of Europeans in Lesotho, with their different culture from that of Basotho. This resulted in the creation of new situations in the society that had to be dealt with by bringing the two cultures together at working levels; dual systems were introduced such as a
judiciary (customary and common laws) and a parliamentary system, with democratically elected leaders and hereditary traditional chiefs who had no term of office or separation of
88 powers, as is reflected in Chapter One. Some individuals in the colonial administration criticized the dependence of people on their chiefs, who were the most powerful and wealthiest in the community and, thus, appeared to be using their followers as labour and as obedient subjects who were respectful to their leaders (Pule & Thabane, 2002).
Accordingly, political parties emerged to challenge the manner in which the traditional system operated, and by developing different policies, thus exercised individualism and freedom of choice. Consequently, the new politicians did not want to develop a viable and locally informed citizenship education programme that would affirm citizenship engagement in public issues (Abdi, 2008; Maathai, 2009; Shizha & Abdi, 2013), for fear that their powers would be challenged. Nevertheless, democracy, as an imported concept, brought its own ideal moral principles and rectified some of the traditional inequalities. This transition between the traditional and modern systems, however, has created problems of apathy and confusion about democracy as a value, and a social and political process, which this study explores. The following paragraphs attempt to analyse, according to the available literature, some of the issues that have contributed to this confusion.
The Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Environment (2008) (MOTCE) and Khaketla (1971), outline that in 1959 a local government proclamation was passed, which paved the way for the District Council elections of 1960. The electoral contestants were from Basotho political parties. The District Councils were elected at the (pitso) public meeting, in the manner described in the paragraph on the concept of deliberative democracy, where people are elected in a public assembly. Their role was to advise the colonial Basotholand Council and forward the motions for debate. Two representatives from each District Council formed part of the Basotholand Council.
However, Khaketla (1971) notes that the District Councils were abolished in 1968, two years after independence, by the Basotholand National Party government and were replaced by Village Development Committees that were created in 1970. The MOTCE (2008) illustrates that after the 1993 democratic government, a new ministry of local government and chieftainship (MOLGC) was formed. The first local government elections were held in 2005, following the District Council elections of 1960. The Local Government Act of 1996 provided for the establishment of proper local government. These District Councils were organized as
89 community councils, urban councils, municipal council and district councils. The chiefs remain ex-officio on the councils at each level, as an important acknowledgement of the traditional leadership. However, they are the minority in the councils and do not hold any substantive position. This implies that the democratic values of equality in terms of exercising political rights and freedoms is unrecognized in the electoral democracy when leaders are elected, showing that democratic leaders are not practicing democratic life. This study provides answers to the question of how do people, including democratic leaders, understand the concepts of democracy and citizenship, the findings of which are presented in Chapters Five and Six.
The Ministry of Local Government and Chieftainship (2009b) MOLGC outlines the challenges within the ministry. These include: weak inter-departmental linkages between the
departments within the ministry, meaning that there is no collaboration towards a working decentralized local government system; politicized, unclear, poorly defined, unregulated and unchecked functional links between the centralized ministry and local government structures in the councils. Furthermore, it is indicated, in the framework for the preparation of the National Decentralization Action Plan for the ministry (MOLGC, 2009a), that
directorates at the central government perform council level functions with the excuse that councils lack capacity. This is mainly because there are no visible transition arrangements and capacity development efforts in place for this. There are poor reporting lines from the District Administrator and the District Council Secretary to the central ministry, which then enables the latter to exploit this ambiguity (MOLGC, 2009a).
Decentralization was put in place in 2005 with empty promises, because there were no policies and legal frameworks or guiding documents for its implementation, once more indicating that it took place as a top-down approach (MOLGC, 2009a). Politically, there is inadequate clarity on the role of parliamentarians in the operation of councils. On
observation, this shows the result of an electoral democracy where people are elected as representative leaders with no clear strategies of how decentralization functions to address people’s needs and interests (meaning that people choose leaders based on patron-client relations rather than policy evaluation), as Lindberg (2006) illustrates. This contrasts with the way traditional leadership operated, which was in a democratic manner, even though they were not elected. Traditionally, interests and peoples’ needs were directly discussed
90 (direct democracy) in a different manner from an electoral/procedural democracy
(representative democracy). It has been argued that democratic values were highly observed during the traditional leadership era as compared to this current system of democratic leaders (Abdi, 2008; Gboku & Lekoko, 2007).