. . . says Majoro is arrogant and was wrong to rebuff recall by NEC
. . . vows to contest for the ABC leadership in 2024
AHEAD of the ABC special conference which gets underway tomorrow, Lesotho Times editor Herbert Moyo and deputy editor Silence Charumbira sat down with party secretary general Lebohang Hlaele to discuss preparations for the eagerly anticipated event.
Mr Hlaele also shared his thoughts on Prime Minister Moeketsi Majoro’s fallout with his party national executive committee (NEC) colleagues who voted to recall him from his position on 2 December 2021. Below are excerpts of the interview:
LT: The elective conference gets underway this tomorrow. Are you ready for the big event?
Hlaele: We hope to elect a credible person to reunite and lead our party into the general elections this September.
The preparations are at an advanced stage. We are expecting close to 1500 delegates. So, basically all is in order and we are ready for the conference.
LT: On 2 December 2021, you were part of an NEC meeting which voted to recall Prime Minister Majoro and replace him with Mr Nkaku Kabi. But he refused to resign saying under our Westminster political system a party cannot recall a prime minister but parliament. Now Dr Majoro is one of the candidates for the leader’s post. Should we then say the NEC is a toothless bulldog whose bark is worse than its bite?
Hlaele: It was uncalled for and very unfortunate that the prime minister said he was not accountable to the party. It is all about understanding politics. One has to understand politics. The prime minister does not understand politics. You cannot say that you are only accountable to MPs and not the party. Where do the MPs come from?
The MPs are deployees of the party and they are also accountable to the party. The MPs have been deployed by the party to further its interests and aspirations in government. Now, the MPs are implementors of the decisions of the party in parliament.
Yes, the NEC decided to recall the prime minister but he flatly refused and told the NEC that he would not resign. The NEC can’t be said to be a toothless bulldog because he (Dr Majoro) didn’t resign.
The constitution of our country does not give any political party the power to recall a prime minister. It was up to him to say that since my party has decided to recall me, I must respect the decision of my party. But he refused to do that.
The question is how then is he gunning for a position yet he has shown the NEC a middle finger and he now aspires to lead a party run by the very NEC that he despises. Is the NEC a toothless structure? No, it is not? I think the conference will guide us it will give us directions on how to tackle this and all other issues within the party.
LT: One would still argue the NEC is a toothless bulldog because even your MPs can refuse to abide by its decisions. You will recall that the NEC had initially chosen Samuel Rapapa to replace Mr Thabane as prime minister but the MPs demanded a vote wherein they chose Dr Majoro. The NEC is toothless because the MPs rubbished its choice of Mr Rapapa. Afterwards, the NEC recalls Dr Majoro but he refuses to abide by its decisions. Even after being recalled, he is one of the candidates for the leader’s position. How then can you say the NEC isn’t toothless?
Hlaele: The NEC is not at all a toothless bulldog. It’s just we have been travelling a bumpy road as a party and the situation needed people with wisdom to unite the party. When the NEC chose Ntate Rapapa and the MPs said no, they did not say it arrogantly. They asked for an opportunity to choose. That was wrong and we should not have allowed them to do that. But we only did so because we were massaging each other’s egos in the best interests of our party.
Majoro became a prime minister through that election process but now he is saying that he was not elected by the party but by the MPs. Now, he doesn’t see the bigger picture politically. He thinks that the MPs actions in demanding a chance to elect the PM was right and therefore he has the audacity to now say, ‘I won’t listen to you, I will listen to my bosses (the MPs)’. Yet the truth of the matter is that his real boss is the party and nobody else.
So, you could interpret all this to mean that we are toothless. Maybe so, but we were looking at the bigger picture of uniting the party. Ours has been a painful journey to get where we are and it is still going to be a painful journey to get where we would want to be.
LT: There was infighting when Professor Nqosa Mahao was deputy leader. It had been hoped that his departure would help end the feuding in the party. But it has not ended even after you co-opted Dr Majoro as deputy leader. Why is this so?
Hlaele: The question should be why did we co-opt Majoro into the national executive committee. The reason was that we thought that he would understand where his power lies. But we have since discovered that he doesn’t understand where his power lies.
LT: Supposing that Dr Majoro loses the leadership race, what is going to happen?
Hlaele: I don’t have a definitive answer on that. We don’t have long before the elections. Parliament may even be dissolved in May and then we will be left with three months before the elections can be held. The NEC would have to sit down to consider if it is appropriate for us to re-deploy him when we will be left with a few months before the elections.
It’s an issue which will have to be addressed because if we have a party leader who is not the prime minister we could end up having two centres of power. I am not for two centres of power. Two centres of power are dangerous more especially when we are close to elections. So that must be addressed.
The centre should be the ABC and whoever has been deployed to government as the prime minister will need to be accountable to the party. Even if the premier has lost the leadership race, he would still need to be accountable to the party. Once that is understood, there will not be two centres of power.
LT: When the current government was formed, the expectation was that because of your position in the party, you would be in cabinet. You did not get into government and rumours were that you were positioning yourself for the leadership of the party. But now the leadership of the party is up for grabs and you have chosen not to contest. What happened?
Hlaele: The bigger issue, for me, is to be in a united party. If the party had been united as before, believe me, I would have been among the contestants for the leadership position. However, I analysed the situation and said to myself, if all of us get in the contest, who will be left behind to steady the party while all of us are out campaigning? The secretariat is the engine of the party. So, I decided against running and so many people were angry with my decision. They said I had not told them when I decided to change my mind about contesting.
I was going to run. But I just changed my mind one night and decided not to run.
But I will tell you this. Like any other politician, I have ambitions. I was also going to run but I realised that the timing was not right. My time will come. It is not my time for now.
Once things are in order, in 2024, I will be running for the party leader’s post. Not now.
LT: How do you rate your chances as a party in the general elections? Your colleagues in government, the Democratic Congress (DC), have been a solid outfit whereas the ABC has been riddled with divisions? The DC even has several campaign billboards in strategic places but you don’t have anything in place.
Hlaele: (Laughing). Billboards do not necessarily translate to votes. They are just a means of mobilising people. The D-day is the day of the elections. Our preparations will intensify after the King has dissolved parliament. That is when you can ask us what our chances will be.
That is when you can ask us if we are either going to be leading government. That is when I can give you an answer. For now, your question is based on billboards. And billboards don’t vote. They don’t determine electoral outcomes.
