Tšeliso Moroke
Neighbourhoods in Lesotho are not planned. They do not consistently meet basic planning standards, zoning principles, or long-term spatial logic. This condition is not limited to informal settlements. Even suburbs described as middle or high income fail to comply fully with accepted planning norms.
Roads are narrow or improvised, drainage is often absent, land use is incoherent, and public spaces are poorly designed or missing altogether. What distinguishes these areas is income, not planning quality.
Taken together, Lesotho’s settlements can accurately be described as informal, not because of poverty alone, but because of the absence of deliberate spatial order. This is not merely an urban design problem. It is a development problem.
Well-planned neighbourhoods are not about beauty or elitism. They are economic infrastructure. Spatial planning determines how workers move, how businesses cluster, how services are delivered, how land values rise, and how cities absorb population growth. Planning shapes productivity, competitiveness, and long-term fiscal sustainability.
Countries that understand this treat planning as a strategic economic tool. They know that without proper planning, they will continuously pay through congestion, inefficiency, inequality, and weak investment performance.
To understand the power of spatial planning, one needs only study apartheid South Africa. Separate development was not sustained by political ideology alone. It was engineered through zoning laws, transport corridors, settlement layouts, and housing design. The apartheid economy was spatially constructed, and that spatial legacy remains visible and economically costly today. Planning was politics expressed through physical space.
In Lesotho, we fail to grasp this connection. Because we do not understand the effect of planning on quality of life, we replace substance with symbolism. We invest in monuments, façades, and isolated prestige projects and claim these enhance national identity. They do not.
Urban identity is not created by how a city looks from a distance, but by how it functions up close. It is defined by accessibility, density, safety, integration, efficiency, and opportunity. A city that is visually impressive but functionally broken is not a development success. It is a distraction from deeper failures.
This confusion reflects deeper political choices. Countries that take planning seriously deliberately organise living areas, work zones, transport systems, and recreational spaces as part of an integrated economic strategy. Barbados offers one such example. There, spatial planning is not buried inside a technical department. It is housed at the centre of government because it directly affects growth, climate resilience, and national competitiveness.
In Lesotho, the centre of government is focused elsewhere. Political energy is consumed by struggles over power and control, especially over the security sector, while the instruments that quietly shape everyday life and long-term prosperity are neglected. Authority matters more than organisation. Control matters more than coordination.
Even decentralisation, at minimum, should be strategically located at the centre of government because it directly affects spatial development, service delivery, and local economic systems. Yet this remains a marginal debate. Our strategic priorities are misaligned.
We speak passionately about job creation, investment attraction, and economic growth, yet we allow settlements to expand in ways that actively undermine these goals. Land is allocated without infrastructure. Developments are approved without services. Disorder is normalised instead of corrected. Planning institutions are weakened to accommodate political convenience rather than strengthened to protect public interest.
This pattern is not accidental. It is political.
When planning is ignored, discretion flourishes. When standards are weak, patronage fills the gap. When space is unregulated, power becomes personal rather than institutional. Poor planning is not only a technical failure. It is a governance choice.
This is how the country moves. Not by design, but by default. Not by strategy, but by accommodation.
The result is a settlement pattern that constrains opportunity, deepens inequality, and locks the economy into inefficiency. Workers travel long distances at high cost. Businesses operate far from customers and suppliers. Public services struggle to reach scattered populations. Infrastructure becomes expensive to build and impossible to maintain. Informality spreads not because people reject order, but because order is never provided.
Until spatial planning is recognised as a core economic and political instrument and placed where it belongs in the architecture of the state, Lesotho will continue to build neighbourhoods that undermine its own development ambitions. Planning must move from the margins to the centre of decision-making. It must be treated as a tool of economic policy, social policy, and governance reform.
A country that does not plan its space cannot plan its future.
Summary
- Urban identity is not created by how a city looks from a distance, but by how it functions up close.
- A city that is visually impressive but functionally broken is not a development success.
- It is housed at the centre of government because it directly affects growth, climate resilience, and national competitiveness.
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