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Lesotho: Election underway, incumbent Mosisili pledges to step down if defeated
Incumbent Prime Minister of Lesotho, Pakalitha Mosisili. PHOTO/Xinhua
Lesotho’s one million voters went to the polls Saturday in a tight general election where bitter personal rivalries among the three main party leaders have overshadowed worries about jobs and poverty.
Polls were set to close at 5:00 pm (1000 EST) after 10 hours of voting across this mountainous kingdom in which most people live as farmers in isolated villages where horses far outnumber cars.
Voters began arriving long before dawn, many walking over hills and mountains while wrapped in blankets to wait in the cold outside schools and churches to cast their ballots.
The three main party leaders were all once allies whose falling out centred on the refusal of Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili to hand over the reins of power.
Within the Lesotho Congress for Democracy, which Mosisili brought to power in 1998, tensions over his leadership sparked a split with the prime minister forming his own party in February.
He is asking voters to give him another term with his new Democratic Congress party, campaigning on Lesotho’s relative stability on his watch, which came after a long dictatorship and a rocky period of monarchy.
But a Gallup poll released last month ranked Mosisili among Africa’s five most despised leaders, with only 39 percent of those surveyed approving of his job performance, placing him alongside the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
