IEC must engage political players

THE issues raised by the Democratic Congress (DC) Youth League over the manner in which the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) ran last October’s general elections merit close attention.

The temptation would be to dismiss these concerns as the rambling of a group of overzealous party youths still smarting from last year’s election defeat.

However, a close reading of their letter which the youth league wrote to the IEC this week would suggest they are genuinely concerned about the integrity of the elections and the future of democracy in Lesotho.

The DC’s National Executive Committee has since added its voice that it will boycott November’s local government elections unless the IEC apologises for its misdemeanours in last October’s election.

The statement by the youth league comes amid allegations that the DC has not fully come to terms with its devastating loss in last October’s general elections.

The occasional jabs at Prime Minister Sam Matekane and his government would seem to support such an assertion.

After reading the letter, it is quite clear that DC and its youth league feel genuinely aggrieved by how the IEC ran last year’s elections. It is quite a sober statement, free from emotion.

Apart from a simple apology from the IEC, the DC youth league is demanding transparency in how elections are run in Lesotho so that they do not produce contested outcomes in future.

That to us, is a fair demand.

The DC says a large section of their supporters were disenfranchised after their names were “transferred to different voting locations without their knowledge” while others were transferred to entirely different constituencies.

The party feels that these administrative errors were so huge as to tilt the electoral outcome and affect the integrity of the entire electoral process.

The DC Youth League is also not happy with how the IEC blundered when it allocated Proportional Representation (PR) seats.

Yet in spite of all the errors, what appears to have miffed the DC youths is the apparent lack of remorse by the IEC. It says the Commission has not bothered to apologise to the political parties and Basotho following the mistakes.

If it fails to apologise the League says it will conclude that the “current IEC has no interest in holding free and fair elections” and “will request (its) removal from office on the grounds of incompetence before the Local Government elections are declared”.

In the interests of democracy and political stability, it would only be fair that the IEC robustly engages political parties in Lesotho.
Where there have been mistakes, the Commission must address these so that it retains the trust of all political players. Trust is a key tenet of any electoral process.

It would be unfortunate if political parties were to lose their confidence in the IEC as the adjudicating authority on elections in Lesotho.

We however do not subscribe to the thinking that the IEC was out to manipulate the election results in favour of any single political party. We also do not think there was any gerrymandering of constituencies to engineer a predetermined election result.

What we saw after the October elections appeared to be genuine technical errors by the IEC. In any case, such genuine errors need to be acknowledged promptly so that there is no suspicion that the electoral body was in bed with any of the key parties that contested the elections.