After meticulous verification Scrutator is proud to announce that Motsoahae Thomas Thabane is the winner of the coveted Mediocrity Award for 2010.
Tom has also made history by becoming the oldest winner of the mediocrity gong.
Tom had a good thing going when he formed the All Basotho Convention (ABC) in 2006 and for a while it seemed like the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (you can read that as Lesotho Chaos for Democracy if it pleases you) was on its way out.
Then, as normally happens with opposition leaders, power and fame got to his head sooner than he could say A-B-C.
He started behaving like a dictator.
And to consolidate his grip on the party’s leadership he marginalised independent thinkers and surrounded himself with pathetic “Yes Men” who knew zilch about politics.
Molobeli Soulo, a hefty man, found himself in the party’s chairmanship position.
Because a job that needed a strategic thinker had been given to a sumo wrestler things quickly went haywire.
The goodwill the party had amassed over the years soon vanished.
Where we once had healthy discourse about how the party was going to change the way we are governed we are now hearing childish insults synonymous with those from a preschool playground.
It didn’t take long for Tom to start making political blunders.
He pulled the ABC out of its alliance with the Lesotho Workers’ Party.
When party youths tried to protest the decision at a rally in Mazenod they were pummeled by Thabane’s bodyguards whom I also hear are big on muscle but very small on brains.
Tom started seeing shadows everywhere.
When the ABC lost three by-elections to the troubled ruling party he blamed the embarrassing defeat on “vote engineering” by the electoral commission. Even when Soulo, his right-hand-man, faced a hostile reception at the party’s special conference Tom still defended him with shocking vim.
It didn’t matter that a delegate had described Soulo as “unconstructible”.
This will go down as the year Tom really butchered his reputation both politically and socially.
He stood by while his sons mercilessly beat his wife for merely reporting that his cousin had tried to rape her.
After beating her to a pulp they left her for dead.
Had it not been for a Good Samaritan who picked her up and took her to hospital that woman would have been history by now.
You would expect an educated man who served as a minister for years to show some contrition but when a newspaper called to ask him about the issue Thabane lost his cool.
He threatened to kill the reporter and his editor because they were “meddling” in his affairs.
Scrutator hopes the seasoned politician will repent from his silly ways.
She also hopes he will seek better company that can advise him properly this year.
After much consideration Scrutator decided that the Lesotho Football Association (Lefa), that silly excuse of a football association, had not done enough to win this year’s award.
A second position was more appropriate.
Yet that does not mean they were far behind the eventual winner though.
They had a deep-pocketed sponsor but they almost lost the deal because of their shenanigans.
They bungled even the most basic of administrative issues.
Perhaps the real reason why Lefa fell short of the top position this year is because they showed that they were willing to somehow repent.
They demoted that pompous acting chief executive who thought there was more value in dishing out T-shirts at matches than dealing with real issues that affected our football.
Lefa has a new chief executive and so far things have been promising.
The Under-20 national team has done pretty well.
One hopes the demon of mediocrity will not grip Lefa’s management again.
The Basotho National Party leader Metsing Lekhanya deserves the third place for clinging to power for almost a year even when the majority of party members had made it clear that they wanted him out pronto.
On two occasions the old man ducked the axe by using tricks.
On December 18 he finally met his comeuppance.
He started the special conference as leader and ended it as an ordinary member.
It is sad that Lekhanya had to be dragged from office screaming and shouting as if some great injustice had been done to him.
Lekhanya must go back to the village and play with the grandchildren like other old people of his generation.
The old man must just vamoose.
ABC MP Libe Moremoholo deserves special mention for closing the year in style.
The garrulous MP was disgraced after he was found guilty of pinching M300 from parliament.
It’s shocking that a man who earns M21 000 per month could be accused of “looting” M300, money which is enough to buy only three pairs of underwear.
Moremoholo is now busy on radio stations protesting his innocence but that does not change the fact that his fellow MPs have found him of guilty of theft.
Before we put 2010 behind us Scrutator feels it would be unfair not to mention the Lesotho Athletics Amateur Association.
The LAAA was simply amateurish when it tried to ban athletes from participating in international competitions.
Scrutator would like to thank her supporters and enemies for reading the column.
There will be big things this year.
What a year it has been for Scrutator.
Her readership is growing and so is her battalion of enemies.
Life has never been this good for the girl from Qacha’s Nek.
Adios.
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