Bid to revive Smart Partnership Hub

MASERU – THE government is reviving the Lesotho Smart Partnership Hub in an effort to boost industry and eliminate bottlenecks on investment projects. Shata Mothae was appointed the new director of the Hub last year. He took over from ’Mampai Lebeko who has since retired.

The Smart Partnership Hub, housed in the Prime Minister’s office, helps the government to eliminate bottlenecks resulting from bureaucracy which may obstruct entrepreneurial projects in industry and commerce.

Lebeko told the Smart Partnership Hub’s revival indaba last Thursday that civil servants had sabotaged the project leading to its collapse. She said she battled to stop civil servants from using the Hub as a means to claim per diems even when they had not travelled for foreign trips.

“The Smart Partnership Hub had turned into a tool through which they had a chance to fly abroad,” Lebeko said.

“They would call each other and reserve their names in the list of those who would travel with the rightful participants at the international Smart Partnership activities.”

Lebeko said when she realised that this was the practice she stopped the abuse by inviting only eligible smart partners, especially from the professional links, who did not work in government.

“After I did that our progress was deliberately hampered,” she said.

The links, that include the academia, business, economy, media, youth, and social and cultural, abruptly stopped participating in the Hub. Speaking at the revival indaba, Mothae said it is now “time to reflect and see where we went wrong so that we correct and move forward”.

One of the pioneers of the Smart Partnership Hub, Tlohang Sekhamane, said the hub is a good initiative but unfortunately “Lesotho is where good ideas are born and also the graveyard of the same good ideas”.

“In my lifetime I have seen many good ideas in this country wax and later melt,” Sekhamane said.

Exhorting Mothae to be a good leader, Sekhamane said “the mark of a good leader is how many leaders better than himself he has created”. Sekhamane said the Smart Partnership Hub “encourages people to work together, create and sustain opportunities to access the global trade”.

“We create opportunities that if I was alone would not achieve,” he said.

He said it is because of the Smart Partnership Hub that Limkokwing University of Creative Technology decided to set up a campus in Lesotho. It is also because of the Smart Partnership Hub that the Ministry of Trade established the One-Stop-Shop to ease business registration process, among others.

The Smart Partnership Hub was also instrumental in bringing the warring famo gangs together and struck a peace agreement before 2016 but after the links stopped participating there were violent clashes again.

The man who led the peace talks between the Terene and Seakhi under the auspices of the Smart Partnership Hub, Lira Ralebese, said “at the time it was becoming more and scarier to even talk” about famo issues.

“However, the office motivated the leadership of the day to engage all the warring factions to lay down their weapons and make peace,” Ralebese said.

“The warring factions did at the time lay down weapons, victims were given counselling by our sister Ministries of Social Welfare and the LDF,” he said.

Ralebese said unfortunately this noble initiative did not live beyond the government that supported it. He said it is “implying that lack of political will also poses a challenge for some good initiatives to succeed”.

The Smart Partnership Hub is also credited with uniting the business community in a forum where they held the government accountable – talking directly in the same room with the cabinet. Ralebese said “that noble initiative was choked to death by ill-application of politics”.

Mothae called for unity, pledging to do his utmost to reunite the Smart Partnership Hub links “so that we are back on track”. The Smart Partnership Movement is an initiative under the auspices of the Commonwealth Partnership for Technology Management (CPTM).

It is targeted at combining the resources of the CPTM with those of the private sector to facilitate optimal exploitation of technology for attainment of economic development.

Caswell Tlali