Lesotho in 2005

Lesotho in 2005

Area: 30,355 sq km (11,720 sq mi) Population (2005 est.): 2,031,000 Capital: Maseru Chief of state: King Letsie III Head of government: Prime Minister Bethuel Pakalitha Mosisili

In early May 2005 Lesotho’s Independent Electoral Commission announced that the ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy had won most of the 1,000 seats in the country’s first-ever municipal election. Voter turnout was only about 30%, however, and for most people the election was clearly an irrelevance in the face of increasing poverty.

Poverty increased for a number of reasons; agricultural production continued to decline, in part because of endemic soil erosion in the very limited arable land combined with repeated droughts and in part as a consequence of the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on the workforce. Up to half a million people in the rural areas of the small mountainous country suffered from food shortages. While a government Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper put the country’s unemployment rate at 31%, most observers estimated that more than 70% of the workforce was jobless. Whereas in the late 1980s almost half the gross national product had come from remittances from over 120,000 migrant workers in the South African gold mines, with the retrenchment of such workers, only half that number were employed in 2005. Hopes that the textile and clothing industry would be the key engine of growth were hard hit by the end on Jan. 1, 2005, of the World Trade Organization Agreement on Textiles and Clothing. This led to the closure of a number of factories and put many of the 56,000 jobs in the sector at risk, for while Lesotho still enjoyed duty-free access to the American market under the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, it could no longer compete with goods from countries such as China.

Christopher Saunders