Letsosa’s hunt for witches

Three days before the New Year, Motlalentoa Letsosa, the former home affairs minister, had a rare moment of insight. The little boy in him almost screamed Eureka!

He discovered that fighting corruption is a waste of both state resources and time. Genius neh? Being a common Mosotho man he has become since October 7, Letsosa decided he could offer some unsolicited advice to the government.

“Now everyone knows that witch hunt wastes the government’s time and resources. Those who tried it before have not convicted even a single person. This government should stop the witch hunt and deliver desperately needed services to Basotho. My advice!” he said on Twitter.

Of course, he was referring to the DCEO’s raids on several principal secretaries. It is instructive that he doesn’t say investigations but ‘witch hunt’. You don’t need to be Sandawana to know where he got the ‘witch hunt’ thing from.

He is admitting that his government was hunting witches when it arrested corruption suspects. He learned of that cliché when his government was hunting and hounding the DCEO’s director general, Advocate Manyokole.

It was when they were going after Police Commissioner Holomo Molibeli. He should know that witch hunts are doomed to fail because his government was doing witch hunts instead of investigations on corruption.

The DCEO became a witch hunter because his government had starved it of resources to investigate corruption.

And speaking of failure to prosecute the corrupt, Letsosa is an expert because the Congress governments were using the C&R (Catch and Release) strategy to fight corruption.

Instead of hiding in shame, Letsosa is admitting that his government failed to catch and prosecute thieves.

And that those they pretended to catch got away because theirs were witch hunts and not investigations. Because Letsosa is no prophet, he was only reminding us of his government’s failures and not predicting the future.

We know the history of his government but cannot pretend to be fortune tellers about the current one.

The corrupt are worse than witches but to catch them you need an investigation rather than hunting skills. Those who use witch-hunting skills to catch sophisticated white-collar criminals will be wasting the government’s time and resources.

Real witchcraft is using your past failures to predict the future failures of other people whose actions you cannot control.

Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuuuu!

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