What becomes of a country whose gvt treats court orders like mere suggestions?   

IT is no secret that Auntie Nthomeng has royal blood in her veins. However, that does not place her above the law. Only our great King Letsie III is immune to prosecution. 

No amount of money could ever buy Auntie Nthomeng immunity from the law. Not even Ntate Sam’s billions (if he still has them). We are all subject to the law. 

As someone who has served as head of the judiciary before – the first woman to head the Lesotho courts – one would think Auntie Nthomeng would set the direction for this government when it comes to legal issues. Aooo! Shame after disgrace. 

At first, Lady Scrutator was shocked when the RFP constitution had so many errors when the party had the former chief justice in its headquarters. Secondly, she allegedly ordered DPP Motinyane to bend the Constitution and bow to her pressure to drop treason and murder charges against Ntate Metsing. Just imagine! 

And now, she is alleged to be behind the unconstitutional removal of the hardworking Adv Polaki. 

Chief Justice Sakoane issues an order that says, essentially: “do not touch the Ombudsman until the court has decided her case”. But no, Auntie Nthomeng says, “I have sat in that chair before you, so my decisions are superior to yours – I will remove that Ombudsman”. 

It is high time Justice Sakoane takes out his sjambok and whips the executive much like he did with those soldiers that killed Lisebo Tang. If the judiciary does not make an example by sending one of the members of the executive to jail for disregarding binding court orders, those in government will never respect the rule of law. In fact, they are setting a bad precedent that even ordinary citizens might copy. 

There are moments in a nation’s life when a single incident exposes a much deeper problem. The alleged locking out of Adv Polaki from her office, despite a Constitutional Court order preventing her removal, is one such moment. 

Let us set the scene, because the comedy writes itself better than Lady Scrutator ever could. Adv Polaki arrives at her office at the Post Office Building in Maseru to find the doors locked. She sends in her Special Operations Unit bodyguards to check. They confirm: locked. Moments later, those same bodyguards are summoned by their supervisor and simply vanish, never to return. A sitting constitutional office bearer, protected by a Constitutional Court order barely days old, left without a key and without a guard on the very same morning. If this were a movie, we would call it lazy scriptwriting. In Lesotho, we call it Wednesday. 

And here is the punchline nobody in the government seems to appreciate: this eviction happened on the exact same day the government was hosting its own accountability summit at the Manthabiseng Convention Centre. Adv Polaki was even listed on the programme as a speaker. One imagines the seating chart: “Reserved for the Ombudsman — who we have just locked out of her office and stripped of security”. You cannot make this up. You would think somebody in the planning committee might have flagged the irony, but irony, like court orders, appears to be in short supply at the top table these days. 

Government’s response? A shrug worthy of an Oscar. The Minister of Law and Justice says he was not aware of any of this, had not seen any court order, and was hearing about the lockout for the very first time from a journalist. One wonders what exactly the Minister of Law and Justice is minister of, if not law and justice happening under his own government’s roof. 

Meanwhile, the legal fight itself is a proper constitutional soap opera. Adv Polaki says the Tenth Amendment’s transitional provisions kept her in office until Parliament actually gets around to setting up the “Responsible Authority” it was supposed to establish to oversee the appointment of her successor, among other things. Parliament, it turns out, has had almost 10 months to do this and has done — by all accounts — nothing. So the government wants to fire the Ombudsman for overstaying a term that, according to her, never legally ended, using a transitional mechanism that Parliament itself failed to build. It is rather like evicting a tenant for staying past the lease when you never finished building the new house you promised them. 

Let us not forget the paper trail, because Auntie Nthomeng’s government does love its paper trails right up until the moment they become inconvenient. Uncle Sam wrote to Adv Polaki on 1 June, informing her that her term would end automatically on 30 June and that no extension or reappointment was on the cards. Adv Polaki, being a lawyer of some standing, had already written to the Speaker back in December asking for clarity, then petitioned Parliament’s own Portfolio Committee in May when nobody bothered to answer. She was told, essentially, that Parliament had no power to help her and should try the Prime Minister instead. So she wrote to the Prime Minister too, warning that recruiting a replacement would be unconstitutional. The government’s legal team, for its part, argued in court that there was no urgency at all, and that if anything the urgency was of Adv Polaki’s own making for not rushing to court back in August 2025. One struggles to see the logic: the woman spent 10 months following every proper channel — the Speaker, the Committee, the Prime Minister himself — and the government’s defence is that she should have skipped straight to litigation. Perhaps next time she will know better than to be polite. 

Enter Ntate Mofomobe of the Basotho National Party, never one to let a scandal pass without commentary. He points a finger squarely at Auntie Nthomeng, alleging she wants her old judicial clerk installed in Adv Polaki’s chair. Whether or not that particular claim holds up, the pattern he points to is harder to dismiss: DPP Motinyane, reinstated by court order after her suspension was declared null and void, only to be denied access to her own office. Seventy-seven intelligence officers reinstated by the Court of Appeal, still waiting. Adv Mathabo Mokoko of Revenue Services Lesotho, protected by an interim order, dismissed anyway, earning the board a contempt finding. Now Adv Polaki. If this is a coincidence, it is a remarkably disciplined one — the same script, performed with different actors, on what is becoming an annual government production. 

There is a serious question buried under all this satire, and it deserves to be asked plainly: what happens to a country where court orders are treated as suggestions? The Constitution is not a menu from which the executive orders what it likes and sends back what it doesn’t. When the government that hosted an “accountability summit” cannot be held accountable to its own courts, the summit is not governance — it is theatre, and Basotho are the unpaid audience. 

Auntie Nthomeng may indeed have sat in the Chief Justice’s chair before. But that chair taught the law; it did not grant her the right to sit above it. The Constitutional Court will hear the merits of Adv Polaki’s case on 4 August. Until then, perhaps somebody in government could do the bare minimum: unlock the door, return the bodyguards, and remember that “Rule of Law” is not just a slide in an accountability summit deck. 

When all has been said and done, a government that treats court orders like mere suggestions is not a government. It is not even a stokvel. It’s a tragic circus. 

Ache!!! 

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