Liberating the Mind Before Liberating the Nation: A Reflection on Stadium Area #32
For twenty years, from 2002 to 2022, I stood inside active constituency and national Lesotho politics and watched something happen again and again in Stadium Area constituency: representatives who arrived in the National Assembly detached from the ground they were meant to serve, unaware of, or indifferent to the socio-economic wounds carried by the very people who had put them there. Election after election, the gap between Parliament and the people widened. And with it grew something more corrosive than poverty itself: distrust. Distrust of parties, distrust of politicians, distrust of government as an institution capable of delivering anything at all.
When the Revolution for Prosperity (RFP) emerged, businesspeople stepping into political power, promising a different kind of governance, it felt, for a moment, like an ounce of hope had returned. Perhaps here, finally, was Basotho's last real chance at complete liberation.
But hope built on inherited foundations is fragile. The RFP did not dismantle the system; it inherited it. The same system that every democratic government before it had operated within, the one that has produced our current crisis, remains intact. And a system built to resist radical socio-economic transformation cannot suddenly produce it, no matter who is holding the reins. If the RFP fails to meaningfully eliminate poverty, the risk is not merely political disappointment. It is the very real probability of an uncontrolled revolution from the masses themselves.
Some will point to competent management and call it good governance. But competence within a failing system is not success, it is failure, administered efficiently. The RFP may be failing better than its predecessors, but failing better is still failing. And this is not 2007. It is 2026. Inequity among our people has never been higher. Managing decline gracefully is not the same as reversing it.
What Lesotho needs now is not better management of an old system. It needs radical socio-economic transformation and a governance model that confronts the masses' problems directly, at the root.
A Different Kind of Leadership Within the Party
It is against this backdrop that Stadium Area #32 finds itself fortunate, some would say providentially so, to have elected a representative who understands where the rot truly begins: not in policy documents, but in the mind.
Honourable Mampho Tjabane is, notably, a member of the RFP, the very party inheriting the failing system described above. But where the party's national posture has too often meant managing decline competently rather than transforming it, her work in Stadium Area #32 tells a different story. She is proof that the RFP's original promise, a genuinely different kind of governance, is not dead. It simply hasn't yet been practiced widely enough within the party's own ranks. If there is a model for what the RFP could still become, it may be found not in Maseru's corridors of power, but in the ground-level work happening in this one constituency.
Honourable Mampho Tjabane has approached her tenure with a conviction that echoes one of the deepest truths in the history of liberation movements: no people can achieve complete freedom while carrying an internalized sense of inferiority, a self-worth eroded by generations of poverty.* You cannot legislate your way to dignity. It has to be rebuilt from within.
This is the foundation of her approach, and it marks a genuine departure from politics as usual. Rather than positioning herself as a saviour who alone can solve her constituents' problems, she has worked to build something more durable: solidarity, pride, and a renewed sense of identity and culture among the people themselves. Liberation, in her framing, is not something delivered from Maseru. It is something built, together, from Stadium Area outward.
Perhaps most striking is her willingness to ask her constituents to look inward as well as outward. She has encouraged an honest reckoning, that the oppressive governance system has, in part, functioned because of consent, silence, and unwilling accommodation from the very people it burdens. This is not about assigning blame for poverty and joblessness solely to government, nor is it about excusing government failure. It is about restoring agency: if the people played a role, however involuntary, in sustaining the status quo, they also hold the power to withdraw from it.
That is a demanding message. It is also, ultimately, an empowering one.
The Mind First, Then the Country
Hon. Tjabane's work in Stadium Area #32 is, at its core, an exercise in restoring self-respect as the starting point for everything else. She is cultivating a mindset in which her constituents see themselves as fully human, capable, dignified, and rooted in pride for their own identity, not because government has handed them prosperity, but because they can stand on their own and feed themselves.
It is this shift, from waiting for change to be granted, to recognizing themselves as the agents capable of driving it, that may prove to be her most lasting contribution. Because as history has shown, in Lesotho and far beyond it: the mind must be liberated before the country can be.
In a political landscape scarred by two decades of disconnection and disappointment, and within a party still finding its footing, that is not a small thing. It is, perhaps, the only thing that has ever truly mattered. And it may yet be the example the rest of the RFP needs to follow.
Source: Mangaliso Makakole