They got it wrong

LAST Friday, High Court judge, Justice Molefi Makara granted a discharge to former Minister of Finance Dr ’Mampono Khaketla who was being charged with corruption and abuse of office.
Khaketla was accused of soliciting a M4 million bribe to award a lucrative fleet management tender to a local company.

She was subsequently charged with corruption by the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Offences (DCEO) in 2016. The case was to drag on in Lesotho’s courts, which are notorious for their slow pace in dispensing justice, for the next five years.

Now after a lengthy and extremely costly court process, Dr Khaketla has now been acquitted. Dr Khaketla should have been celebrating her victory. Instead, she has been left to count the cost of what has been an extremely taxing period in her life. This is a legal victory tinged with sadness.

This is five years of her life that she cannot recover. It is gone. With the threat of prosecution hanging over her head, Dr Khaketla could not pursue other opportunities to advance her career. This was happening at a time when she was at the peak of her intellectual powers.

She could not be there to see her daughter graduate from a foreign university. That must have been extremely painful.

What must have been more painful for her was to see her reputation, painfully built through years of hard work, go up in smoke. The court case inflicted a serious damage on her good name. For the past five years, her name was always associated with the theft of government money on an industrial scale.

Even though she has been cleared by the court, that reputational damage to her name will continue to linger. This is what makes her case really sad.

Here was an individual who was trying to fend off attacks from a state which has extremely deep pockets. Without a job, she could only go so far in her push to put up a fight.
This was clearly a war of attrition that has left her seriously bruised financially.

While we wish to congratulate Dr Khaketla on her acquittal, her case provides yet another vivid illustration of how powerful individuals in Lesotho often weaponise the law to harass political opponents.

There was no whiff of evidence upon which the court could use to convict Dr Khaketla apart from a claim made by an individual who clearly had an interest in the case. This was a clear case of political victimisation.

The matter then dragged on in court, with one witness dying while other witnesses turned hostile towards the prosecution. In pushing this matter, we would like to believe that the DCEO jumped the gun. It should have investigated the matter fully so as to allow a short, sharp, snap trial.

But we are aware that this has been the trend in Lesotho for a number of years. Individuals are often arrested, charged and investigations are then instituted. If the DCEO had done its work properly, this case was going to be one hell of a case for it to shine. But they squandered that opportunity.

As things stand, the DCEO’s reputation is in tatters. With each case that gets dismissed by the courts, the DCEO is losing the little of its credibility that was still remaining. In its post-mortem following Khaketla’s acquittal, the DCEO must humbly admit that they got this case wrong.