Lesotho in Africa - Nation building

My role as chairman of ICELE, which stands for the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (now you know why we call it ICELE!) over the past year or so has led to me meeting a lot of interesting people who do some pretty fulfilling stuff.

Not least of which was meeting a delegation of Ministers and senior officials in London last weekend from the Kingdom of Lesotho which borders South Africa. A developing nation with an impressive vision, beautiful countryside with highlands and lowlands, limited infrastructure and a population where 41% have HIV Aids.

The United Nations, who are one of ICELE’s partners are helping them with their development plans and we were there with the UN, Council of Europe and UK Government to talk about how eGovernment and eDemocracy can be established in their country.

The statistics of Lesotho show that to be a real challenge. A population of 1.3million with many more people who come from South Africa across the border to work. Very basic, but slowly improving road infrastructure and a population which is spread wide and sparsely and is, in the main, very poor. Although some live in what is a modern looking city, much of the population live in the highlands, which are a staggeringly spectacular mountain range, but very inhospitable too.

The pictures I saw were mesmerising. They are building a growing tourism industry. I was amazed to learn that the temperatures, because of the normal cloudless blue skies, can at some times in the year have a difference between day and night of 40 degrees Celsius. That is some temperature range! Part of the tourism industry is based around skiing, something that doesn’t spring to my mind in Africa but looking at the mountains it’s easy to see why.

Back to why they were in the UK. Lesotho has a very young Local Government system. Developing around Chieftains (traditional local leaders), they are building a democratic system whilst trying to ensure that the mechanism of non democratic governance which has been around for centuries can play a part in the new democratic process.

eGovernment is pretty new to the developed world. It’s only really come into its own over the last five years in the UK. We take for granted internet banking or shopping now but it’s only fairly recently that all UK Government, local and national, has websites and it’s certainly not long that we’ve been able to submit tax assessments on-line and only in the last year or so can we get things like car tax over the internet.

It’s taken a long time to get to where we are and there is an awful long way to go. The work already done around eGovernment in the developed world and the billions of pounds spent means that the mistakes have already been made and from those mistakes great experience and knowledge has been has been gained. So in a strange way the developing world, like Lesotho, probably aren’t as far behind as we may think. They can eventually go straight in with WiFi and other emerging technologies without having spent time and masses of money developing physical infrastructure. Things move so fast nowadays, others have done the learning and development for them.

That said you still need some infrastructure. Less than 10% of the Lesotho population have regular access to telephone, landline or mobile. Surprisingly, nearly 5% have access to the internet although I guess that will be entirely those in the City. It was interesting learning from one of the Ministers how they are frustrated by the big mobile phone companies who promised, when reaching infrastructure supply agreements with the Lesotho Government, far more than they are delivering.

It really is nation building; not quite from scratch, but talking to motivational people like that makes me realise how much we take for granted in our everyday lives. A very interesting time with them and their country looks just beautiful despite their issues. I’d like, at some point, to take up their offer that I should visit them.

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