Across the pages of the Lesotho Times, Newsday Newspaper, Public Eye and The Reporter, a consistent and devastating picture is painted, the public health system of Lesotho is no longer merely under strain. It is failing the very people it was designed to serve.
What we are witnessing as a nation is not a collection of isolated incidents but the systematic collapse of care, dignity and human rights in the hospital corridors of a nation that entrusted its protection to the state.
The Newsday investigation into the Maseru District Hospital was startling: a facility meant to represent a new dawn in Lesotho’s healthcare, instead revealed more than 100 preventable deaths, rampant misdiagnosis, toxic queues, broken diagnostics, staff stretched to the brink and leadership seemingly absent.
Patients and their families were left in limbo while the promise of “modern hospital” echoed hollow yet those responsible to offer answers simply ignored questions and acted busy to care. In the Lesotho Times, the newspaper’s luck to present both the complaints from whistle-blowers, staff insiders and concerned doctors, and the official response from the ministry, confirmed the Newsday investigation and further exposed a tension between lived reality and political narrative.
As the Public Eye returns from the wards of the Berea Hospital, the imagery is bleak: soiled linens, broken laundry machines, infectious and general waste mixed indiscriminately, staff morale plummeting, patients forced to wait, suffer and even death occurring. Yet the issue is still treated as corridors hearsay.
In The Reporter’s coverage one reads of a ministry failing to collect revenue, failing to maintain oversight, failing to even ensure that basic supplies reach clinics and hospitals, yet still affirmed in its pronouncements, unbowed by the evidence it is confronted with.
And in the Sunday Express ― via its coverage of the Queen ‘Mamohato Memorial Hospital, readers learned of creeping privatisation inside what is meant to be the national referral hospital, a move that threatens to further weaken access for ordinary Basotho, and deepen the divide between those who can pay and those who rely on state care.
This is not a crisis of funding alone.
It is a crisis of leadership, of priorities and of human rights.
The health minister, Selibe Mochoboroane, occupies the office that carries the most fundamental duty of government, to safeguard life and dignity. Yet the official posture has been defensive, political, and even dismissive.
Reports of death and neglect are characterised as “ambitious doctor agendas” or “media hype.”
The minister has the temerity to question ground-level sources, to cast those who daily witness mistreatment of patients as actors in political drama, while comfortably stationed in an office removing himself from pain and queues.
Let us confront the numbers. The ministry’s allocation for 2024/25 stood at approximately M3.4 billion. For 2025/26, it dropped to around M3.1 billion.
These figures alone are not the issue, the issue is what these hundreds of millions of Maloti were meant to purchase: human lives, doctors in wards, machines in theatres, clean beds, functioning referrals and hope. And yet, the evidence from every corner of the country is that care is slipping, dignity is being trampled and patients are increasingly at risk.
When the minister stands up and denounces a doctor’s allegations as “self-serving”, we must ask: why would a physician risk career and reputation to make false allegations when the hospitals he walks through each day bear the scars of neglect?
When the minister touts new policy initiatives while hospitals operate in decay, we must ask: who is he serving? The patients, or the politics?
In the past three years, under this government, the health ministry has received the lion’s share of budget among ministries because what could be more essential than life-saving services? Yet we see that the ministry’s revenue collection is in disarray.
The committee on the Social Cluster discovered in 2023/24 that revenue targets had collapsed with only about M5.7 million collected against a target of nearly M30 million. The missed target was pointed to internal financial mismanagement, an issue which whistle blowers are decrying. The same ministry cannot account for its own income streams, how can it account for the lives of Basotho whom it is charged to serve?
It is not enough to murmur about “prioritising primary healthcare” while hospitals in major districts fall apart. It is not enough to celebrate new budgets while beds lie idle, laundry machines broken, waste unmanaged and the sick left waiting. The right to health is not a slogan. It is enshrined in international human rights frameworks, and by every moral measure, the government has failed its people.
The role of the minister is not to hold press conferences or take desired interviews and shift blame and belittling the truth of people who see the pain on a daily.
His role is to walk into the hospitals, ask the nurses why they reuse gloves, ask the patients why they arrived at the emergency ward and found no doctor, demand answers from those who build hospitals but leave them non-functional. Instead, what we see is an office that deflects, that questions the messenger, which interprets symptoms of collapse as political manoeuvres.
One must demand: show us the patients who waited 48 hours, show us the records of “preventable deaths”, explain the broken machines, account for the missing doctors, detail the inactive rice-beds of health infrastructure. Because when those institutions meant to preserve life become theatres of suffering, we are no longer talking about “service delivery failure”, we are talking about state-sponsored human rights violation through neglect.
Basotho elected this government into power, they entrusted it with their lives, their mothers and children, their ageing citizens.
What they are receiving is rhetoric, budgets, press releases and hospitals that look like warehouses of despair.
The minister’s conviction that there is no crisis seems not simply mistaken, but morally vacuous in the face of credible reporting, interviews and testimonials from patients and staff.
For three years the ministry that should embody humanity and care has become a platform for human rights abuse displayed through service collapse, through neglect, through the refusal to see the worst of what is happening inside hospital walls. When hospitals are places where hope goes to die, the government must answer. Not tomorrow. Not after we launch another initiative. Now.
And for the minister, let this be clear; POLITICAL SURVIVAL IS CHEAP COMPARED TO A MOTHER SAVED, A CHILD TREATED IN TIME, A LIFE PRESERVED.
If you have a budget, spend it on saving lives not saving faces. If you hold an office, use it to walk the wards, to sit by the bedside, to listen to the sick and to act on the evidence. Because when you ignore the cries of your people, you betray them.
This is not a plea. This is a demand: Basotho deserve no less than health, dignity and life. If you cannot deliver them, step aside.
Summary
- What we are witnessing as a nation is not a collection of isolated incidents but the systematic collapse of care, dignity and human rights in the hospital corridors of a nation that entrusted its protection to the state.
- In the Lesotho Times, the newspaper’s luck to present both the complaints from whistle-blowers, staff insiders and concerned doctors, and the official response from the ministry, confirmed the Newsday investigation and further exposed a tension between lived reality and political narrative.
- And in the Sunday Express ― via its coverage of the Queen ‘Mamohato Memorial Hospital, readers learned of creeping privatisation inside what is meant to be the national referral hospital, a move that threatens to further weaken access for ordinary Basotho, and deepen the divide between those who can pay and those who rely on state care.
Co-Owner and Managing Editor of Newsday Media Lesotho. PEPFAR Media champion, Award wining features journalist, an Investigative journalist, REPSSI CAB member. Maseru, Lesotho Joined November 2009.
