Constitutional reforms addressed

Lesotho is again working on key constitutional reforms, seeking to bring order to the mountain kingdom's fractious politics, but there's a new hurdle: the government and part of civil society disagree on how to go about it. News24 reports that Law & Justice Minister Richard Ramoeletsi last week introduced the long-awaited Tenth Amendment to the Constitution Bill and the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution Bill that the government of then Prime Minister Moeketsi Majoro failed to pass ahead of 2022 elections. However, while the government wants to amend the existing Constitution, some civil society organisations want to write a new one. The Transformation Resource Centre (TRC), a legal civic group, accused the government of ‘continued misdirection against sound counsel and advisory to its political leadership on astute principles of engagement in constitutionally legitimate reform procedures’ because the Bills were ‘dismemberments of the Constitution's original design’. The TRC said the government had not learnt from its past mistakes and that ‘flaws and mishaps have resulted in a litany of litigated cases and structural pushbacks’.