We have often commended Pakalitha Mosisili for his decorum and statesmanship in ensuring a smooth handover of power when he failed to win a majority in the 2012 elections.
We have also often commended him for some of the good things that he did during his long 25 year reign, particularly fostering peace and stability in the Kingdom.
However, one of his greatest failures was allowing corruption and graft to fester to such unacceptable levels that now seem near impossible to reverse.
We shall, for instance, never understand how Dr Mosisili, as the man ultimately accountable for the actions of his cabinet, could allow the awarding of a high value contract to produce e-passports and identity documents for Basotho to the shadowy Israeli company, Nikuv International Projects, without an open public tender process.
Unlike Prime Minister Thomas Thabane, Dr Mosisili never carried the burden of having to contend with coalition partners. He had all the power. He could have stopped the rot. He didn’t. He allowed a clearly prejudicial deal to go ahead.
We now know that many reputable companies were interested in helping Lesotho achieve this important project. Not help for the sake of help but to achieve their commercial interests as well. Some had better reputations and prices than Nikuv. They were never given a chance. Without an open, competitive bidding process, Lesotho was always going to suffer enormous prejudice. We shall never know who could have given us the best deal.
But what is now crystal clear and abundantly obvious is that the decision to award the contract to Nikuv, without opening it up for competition, was not in the best interests of the country. It was a corrupt and flawed decision.
It did not come as a surprise for us when one top official was charged with corruption in the deal. What, of course, surprises all and sundry is that only this one person has been charged.
There can be no doubt that the reason of not putting this project to an open tender was to facilitate massive bribery and corruption. It is inconceivable that only Retselisitsoe Khetsi, the former principal secretary of home affairs, could be the only one who was allegedly bribed by Nikuv.
In fact rumours have been rife that Dr Mosisili’s Democratic Congress was established with such pomp and fanfare on the back of payments from Nikuv.
Such rumours do no favours for Mosisili’s legacy. It is also a huge pity that the new government decided to proceed with the Nikuv contract when best practice demanded that it be cancelled. Among the reasons advanced for not cancelling was that the government had already made an advance payment to Nikuv.
But as reported elsewhere in this newspaper, it seems the already emaciated Basotho taxpayers will be milked indefinitely by Nikuv. The corrupt deal seems to have been designed to ensure that Nikuv gets as much money as it can for the unforeseeable future in shadowy maintenance costs and partly for the benefit of all the corrupt who facilitated the deal.
It does not help that some in the new government which succeded Mosisili seem to have immediately fallen under Nikuv’s wing with reports that their familes were now being financed by the shadowy company in plum trips abroad.
It is never too late to do the right thing. Dr Thabane must do this Kingdom a favour and appoint a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate the circumstances under which Nikuv was awarded this deal. The contract should in the meantime be cancelled and alternative arrangements put in place, even if this will cost more money, pending the outcome of the inquiry.
There surely will be willing donors to assist in the project if Lesotho proves it is willing to follow international best practice.
In the meantime, Mosisili and every member of his cabinet who set on that fateful day to approve the illicit contract should hang their heads in collective shame. They betrayed this country.
