THE eagerly anticipated 7 October 2022 elections have come and gone with the Sam Matekane-led Revolution for Prosperity (RFP) cruising to spectacular victory over the established parties. It won a commanding 56 out of the 79 constituency seats and subsequently forged a governing coalition with the Alliance of Democrats (AD) and Movement for Economic Change (MEC) parties. This is despite that the RFP was only formed in March this year.
Although the polls were hailed as free, fair and credible by local and international observers, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has got tongues wagging after admitting that it erroneously allocated three proportional representation (PR) seats to the Democratic Congress (DC) and one to the AD.
It has since filed a High Court application to strip the parties of these seats and reallocate them to the Basotho National Party (BNP), Basotho Patriotic Party (BPP) and United for Change (UFC). It does not say who the fourth seat will be allocated to.
The IEC move has incurred the wrath of some political parties, particularly the BNP and the All Basotho Convention (ABC) who argue that this could be an indication that the entire electoral process and the outcome could be flawed. The two parties have demanded an audit of the elections to establish if there were no irregularities which could have compromised the polls which were convincingly won by business mogul Sam Matekane’s Revolution for Prosperity (RFP). They have also demanded the resignation of senior IEC officials including the commissioners and the Director of Elections, Mpaiphele Maqutu. Against this background, the Lesotho Times (LT) Editor, Herbert Moyo, and Deputy Editor, Silence Charumbira, recently sat down with Advocate Maqutu to understand how the “mistake” happened. Adv Maqutu also responded to calls for him and the IEC commissioners to step down in the wake of the egregious error.
Excerpts:
LT: How would you describe the entire elect elections process- from the preparations- to the announcement of the results?
Maqutu: This wasn’t an easy election because from start to finish, it was dogged by lots of lawsuits. One of these lawsuits was by political parties who wanted to stop the constituency delimitation exercise. Fortunately the courts ruled in our favour and allowed the delimitation of constituencies to proceed. The courts however, ruled that we had to redo the delimitation of 20 constituencies where it was deemed that the numbers were either below or above the population quota.
The idea of having a threshold is to ensure that the 80 constituencies are roughly of equal population. It wouldn’t be good to have constituencies that are way bigger or smaller than others. Although the court ruling came at the 11th hour, we still complied with the court order.
We had a major difficulty in that we were underfunded for the elections. In the past we were always given the full amount we would have requested but this time around it wasn’t the case. We were only given M261 million whereas we had requested M321 million.
This was inadequate. You will recall that for 2017 elections when we were given M300 million, there were only 27 political parties. This time around, there were 65 parties and such a big number, which is more than double what we are used to do, posed huge logistical challenges.
We were expected to deliver but with less resources. So, it was not easy at all. There was also the issue of the voters’ roll which had some challenges. Among others, it still had names of deceased people. It has to be borne in mind that for a dead person’s name to be removed from the roll, his family members would have to come and report to us. Nevertheless, having their names on the roll does not affect the outcome of the polls because dead people don’t vote.
Even the duplication of names on the voters’ roll which caused some names to appear in various constituencies didn’t affect the integrity of the results because it’s not possible for anyone to vote twice.
We have systems to ensure that a person cannot vote twice. Firstly we sue the indelible ink to mark a person who has voted. We import the best ink from the likes of India and it cannot be deleted for some weeks. Besides the ink, we also have polling agents representing all the parties stationed at all polling stations. These check and cross out the name of a voter as he goes to cast his ballot.
I merely mention these challenges but they did not affect the credibility and outcome of the elections. Unsurprisingly, the African Union, European Union, SADC, all other international and local observers gave the elections the thumbs up. We delivered a credible election under difficult circumstances.
LT: Please explain in clear terms how the proportional representation (PR) seats are calculated. How does a mistake like the one you made when giving the Democratic Congress (DC) three undeserved seats and one to the Alliance of Democrats (AD) happen?
Maqutu: I will explain by way of example without mentioning any party because the matter is before the courts.
For the first time since the enactment of the Electoral Act of 2011, we had political parties (the Revolution for Prosperity- RFP and National Independence Party- NIP) that won constituency seats but were not entitled to PR seats.
The mistake of erroneously allocating PR seats happened because the law was not applied in full. We did not follow the complete procedures in calculating the seats to be allocated. In calculating the PR seats allocation, what we should have done was to exclude the total votes of the two parties which were not entitled to PR seats. We should have excluded their votes from the total number of votes of other political parties to get a threshold for the allocation of the seats.
When that didn’t happen, we then got a wrong threshold which resulted in us allocating extra seats to parties that didn’t deserve them and denying others parties which deserved them.
But after we realised our own mistake we didn’t wait for anyone to tell us to rectify it. We came out clean and admitted our error. We have even launched a court action against ourselves to correct the mistake we made. Imagine a situation where we had just kept quiet and the error is discovered four years down the line by someone else. This would not have a good thing. So here we are; we owned up to our error and we are taking corrective action. We owned up to our mistakes even before any of the parties or anyone else had discovered them.
LT: Some of the political parties, including the Basotho National Party (BNP) which stands to gain from the reallocation of seats are not satisfied despite that you have come clean. They are demanding that you and the commissioners go further and resign for putting the credibility of the polls at risk. What is your response to calls for your resignation?
Maqutu: I find it disingenuous for some of those politicians are calling on us to resign. The elections results have shown that some of them are so unpopular and they don’t even represent the will of the people. They failed to win a single constituency in the recent polls, they have been failing to win in any of the constituencies in previous elections.
Yet they see no problem with contesting the elections and using up taxpayers’ money. If they genuinely believed in the honour they speak of they should have taken the lead and stopped contesting elections due to the poor performances in successive elections. Yes we made the mistake in calculating the PR seats and we have owned up to it. But the outcome of the lections is not in doubt. The polls were held under the watchful eye of local and international observers who have all given them their seal of approval.
LT: But your critics are right in saying such egregious mistakes could affect the credibility of the polls and even spawn instability in the country. What actions have you taken to prevent a repeat of the same scenario in future elections?
Maqutu: We always engage in self-introspection and it won’t be any different now. We are conducting an evaluation to see how we can strengthen our systems and ensure that we don’t repeat any mistakes that would have been detected. We will also increase our engagements with political parties and our calls to them to be vigilant to ensure everything pertaining the polls is executed in terms of the electoral law. We are also engaging civil society organisations and other stakeholders to ensure the electoral laws and processes are followed to the letter.
