This column should have been published about two weeks back when Ntate Sam Matekane made probably the most remarkable speech of his political career.
Very sadly, there is a very bad habit at the Lesotho Times whereby my page is the first to be sacrificed whenever there is a last minute deluge of advertisements requiring to be accommodated in any edition. Perhaps advertisers of this national masthead must learn to submit their advertisements early to make pagination planning easier. Or readers should protest to the publisher and CEO directly that under no circumstances should my page ever be removed to accommodate last minute advertisers. This because Lesotho needs my perennial wisdom.
Be that as it may, I herewith revisit the column I had written congratulating Ntate Sam for his candid remarks to young people when he addressed the elective conference of his Revolution For Prosperity (RFP)’s tertiary students forum on 15 February 2026 in Khubetsoana.
Whenever a politician stands up to tell the truth, society must always applaud. I therefore applaud the Prime Minister’s very frank revelation, albeit belatedly.
To those among us who live under huge rocks or those who might just have missed that event, the Prime Minister stated that his government was finding it difficult to create jobs for the youth as it had promised.
Remember, Ntate Sam’s bold promise early last year to create a whopping 62 000 jobs for the youth. In unusually frank remarks the Prime Minister, not only walked back on this promise but also told the youths it was not possible for his government to provide a job for each and every youth.
“My fellow youth, the government cannot afford to employ each and every person. It is neither practical nor has it ever been the case anywhere in the world… This is why the government encourages creativity and entrepreneurship, as these are key drivers of job creation.
“Within my office, I lead an initiative called Sebabatso, which encourages and trains young people to start their own businesses. The project is now in its third year of operation, and through it we have seen clear evidence that young people are capable of creating employment opportunities through innovation and creativity, ” Ntate Sam was quoted as saying. Boy!!! He could not have been more right.
Scrutator therefore applauds Ntate Sam for this remarkable intellectual breakthrough.
His discovery that his government cannot create the jobs he promised and neither can it employ every young person in the country was indeed a belated but still very welcome bolt of wisdom.
It is always refreshing when a political leader eventually arrives—somewhere in the vicinity of reality.
This is the same Prime Minister who had once made his promise to create 62 000 jobs with the kind of confidence normally reserved for lottery winners and fake prophets.
I applaud the Prime Minister for finally realizing a small but important detail: governments do not actually manufacture jobs in a factory somewhere in the Cabinet office.
Scrutator would like to assure the Prime Minister that there is absolutely no shame in this discovery. Entire political careers have been built on making impossible promises before quietly rediscovering basic economics.
In truth, governments everywhere do not create jobs.
Businesses and the private sector do.
When the Prime Minister initially made his promise to create 62 000 jobs and asked his ministries to submit their workplans on how to meet this target, Scrutator cringed. If it were not for his belly and dark complexioned fearsome bodyguards, I had wanted to jump on stage and shout to the Prime Minister that he had made one of his most irresponsible statements ever. Now, more than a year later, I am happy that Ntate Sam now acknowledges his statement for what it was and remains – an unlamentable hoax.
Duty of government
The duty of any government is far less glamorous but far more important: it is to create a stable environment where the private sector can thrive. Provide reliable electricity, functional roads, predictable policies, honest institutions and a regulatory system that does not suffocate enterprise.
In other words, the government must build the conditions in which jobs can grow.
Sadly, that is precisely where Lesotho tends to stumble. Investors prefer countries where the lights stay on, policies remain consistent and bureaucrats do not wake up each morning inventing new obstacles for entrepreneurs. Investors want to go to places where they feel safe. Not where machete wielding criminals run amok snatching their wallets.
As long as Lesotho remains among the top six most homicidal nations in the world, no serious investor is headed this way. Sadly. Investors want to go to places where the education system produces data scientists, engineers, computer technicians, electricians. Not where the education system produces buffoons holding degree certificates.
The sooner Ntate Sam acknowledges that Lesotho’s education system is not fit for purpose, the better.
His Sebabatso initiative encouraging young people to start businesses is certainly a step in the right direction.
But very sadly, it will not make much of a difference with an education system that produces “graduates” who believe that the highest purpose of education is to queue outside government offices waiting for employment letters.
Our schools and universities appear to specialise in producing degree-holding job seekers rather than job creators. The curriculum seems expertly designed to manufacture bureaucrats for a government that does not have the money—or the offices—to hire them.
The result is an army of “educated” young people whose entrepreneurial training largely consists of opening a WhatsApp group or twerking on Instagram.
Surely it is time to rethink the entire system.
If Lesotho genuinely wants entrepreneurs, then the education system must start producing problem-solvers, innovators and risk-takers instead of examination-passing specialists in memorising notes dictated in classrooms built in 1966.
So yes, Ntate Sam deserves my congratulations—not for creating 62 000 jobs, but for discovering that creating them was never really his job in the first place. Moreover, how did he come up with the 62 000 figure in the first place. What had he smoked? That’s a story for another day.
For now, If his intellectual awakening continues, the next great revelation might be even more revolutionary: That is a realisation that economic growth requires serious reforms, not campaign slogans.
Scrutator waits with bated breath for it’s not Ntate Sam’s role to create 62 000 jobs. He has no capacity to do that. No Prime Minister – both before or after him – will ever achieve that. It is not the responsibility of Prime Ministers or their governments to create jobs.
The role of Prime Ministers and their governments is to invest in establishing the foundational infrastructure required to create jobs, i.e a viable health and education system, a predictable and friendly business regulatory framework, an independent judiciary that adjudicates disputes without fear, favour or prejudice, a police force that actually catches and punishes criminals, a DCEO that actually halts corruption instead of abetting it, an infrastructure framework that actually works from roads, to bridges to power stations.
Sadly, Lesotho falters on all these fronts? Tell me Ntate Sam, which corrupt civil servant or any other person has your DCEO actually convicted since its establishment donkey years ago? Zilch.
To add to these bottlenecks, settling in Lesotho for any credible investor is a nightmare. Firstly, they have to go to Ntate Mokhosi at Labour to get their work permits. After that, they have to queue before Ntate Lebona at Local Government to get their residence permits. And predictably, Ntate Lebona sits on their applications for one reason or another? Just ask the many professionals at the Polihali project, who left the country frustrated.
Where in this world Ntate Sam will you ever get any country serious about attracting investment splitting the application processes for work and residence permits. Isn’t it common sense that you apply for a work permit for permission to stay and work in the country issuing the permit. Can any investor surely be expected to commute daily from the United States, because they have a work permit but no residence permit because Ntate Lebona runs an incompetent department? Which serious country vests the power of issuing residence permits in a local government minister? Is it any wonder that real investors are staying away and those with patience to queue at Labour are mostly crooks from Pakistan, India that no other country regards seriously as investors and are only after using Lesotho as a springboard to enter South Africa?
So Yes Prime Minister, you have no capacity to create jobs. No government has such. And as long as you and any future Prime Ministers fail to address the structural issues impending job creation by attracting serious FDI, Lesotho will remain a laggard, a backwater and laughing stock which “nobody has ever heard of” .
Coalition of buffoons
Very, very sadly, instead of acknowledging this reality and congratulating Ntate Sam for belatedly realizing the limits to his ambitions and coaxing him to do the right thing, a coalition of organisations that purports to represent youths in Lesotho went completely off tangent.
The organisation calling itself the Coalition for Youth Organizations (CYO) not only took umbrage with Ntate Sam over his honest talk, it also disingenuously insisted that he must create the 62 000 jobs he promised. The CYO did however not offer the slightest hint of how it wants that achieved? How more stupid can an organisation that claims to champion the interests of the youth get?
The CYO – which includes the dementedly named Bacha Shutdown, and others such as the On-Point Foundation, Youth AIDS Free Foundation, Youth in Action, Social Reformers Initiative, People’s Matrix, Lesotho Network Development of the Blind, Lesotho Youth Summit, Voice of Youth Society, and the youth leagues of opposition political parties – issued a badly written statement excoriating Ntate Sam for “a lack of commitment to tackling the unemployment crisis”.
The statement said the Prime Minister’s comments “undermined both the spirit and substance” of his declaration of youth unemployment as a national disaster.
“The Coalition of Youth Organizations expresses deep concern and disappointment at recent remarks by the Prime Minister at the Revolution for Prosperity Student Tertiary League elections, where he stated that creating jobs is difficult and that the government cannot create employment for all young people,” the statement said.
Really CYO? Do you honestly believe that Ntate Sam’s government can create jobs for each and every youth? Which planet do you live on?
The lengthy statement then goes on to excoriate Ntate Sam for having “raised the hopes of young people”. It accuses him of “shifting the narrative” and reminds him that even if he creates the 62 000 jobs he promised, that figure would still be far short of the 310,000 number of unemployed youths needing jobs.
The CYO’s anthropologically foolish statement goes to the heart of why Lesotho will forever be a perennial laggard. As the future leaders of tomorrow, the youths must have basic cognitive capabilities. Where is the future of this country if its future leaders are such dunderheads?
Does the CYO know that Mark Zuckerberg started META platforms when he was just a teenager. Zuckerberg is still a boy, yet he is now among the five richest people in the world employing millions across the world. He can employ the whole of Lesotho’s youths as his gardeners if he so wished. Only that he stays far. And perhaps he needs better educated and practical gardeners?
Has the CYO ever seen Zuckerberg and his wife, Jenniffer, twerking on Instagram despite them being the owners of the platform? Why has the CYO not asked its members why they spend special time twerking on Zuckerberg’s platforms when the owner himself and his wife don’t do that? Is twerking the best way to use brains and the Internet to make money? Didn’t Jeff Bezos use the Internet to create the trillion dollar worth Amazon? Has CYO ever seen him and his pretty wife twerking on the Internet?
Yes, the CYO is right that leadership demands consistency, accountability and delivery. Yes, the CYO is right that youth unemployment remains one of the greatest threats to national stability and social cohesion.
But the CYO is certainly an ignorant entity and does not have solutions. If it was intelligent, it would be focused on telling its youth members that their future is in their own hands, not in Ntate Sam’s coalition. It would instead focus on holding Ntate Sam accountable for his failure to foster a conducive environment for the private sector to create viable jobs, not insist that he should create the 62 000 jobs himself when even a moron knows that he has no capacity to do that?
And why is the CYO not telling us why they don’t have a single Zuckerberg in their ranks?
My conclusion is that the CYO represents everything that is wrong with our education system. Here is a youth representative organisation that believes jobs must be manufactured in government offices. If this is the calibre of youths from whom the future leaders of Lesotho shall be drawn, then God help this country.
For now, it’s wise for the CYO to amend its name to COB (Coalition of Buffoons). Nothing more, nothing less.
Ache!!!
