There is something deeply troubling about a government that expects the Auditor-General to expose waste, mismanagement and irregularities across the public sector, while leaving the institution too underfunded to do its own work.
The Office of the Auditor-General (OAG) has told Parliament that its M30 million allocation for 2026/27 is not even enough to cover salaries, let alone fund the audits Parliament and the nation expect of it. The office requested M67 million. It received the same M30 million it got the previous year.
This is not a minor administrative dispute over figures. It goes to the heart of accountability and constitutional governance.
The Auditor-General is one of the country’s most important guardians of public money, tasked with examining how ministries, departments and public institutions spend taxpayers’ funds and reporting where things go wrong. Starve that institution of resources, and the damage runs far wider than the OAG itself: Parliament loses a vital source of independent information, and citizens lose one of their few real mechanisms for holding government to account.
The irony is hard to miss. Government wants the Auditor-General to scrutinise billions of maloti in public expenditure, yet the institution says it cannot afford petrol, vehicle maintenance or other basic operating costs. Training and audits have reportedly been suspended. The Deputy Auditor-General put it bluntly: without petrol, “our work has effectively stalled”.
The Tenth Amendment has changed the OAG’s institutional standing. The office, once under the Ministry of Finance, now reports to Parliament under the new constitutional arrangement. Auditor-General Mathabo Makenete told the parliamentary committee that the office understood this to mean its budget should now be handled through Parliament. The government cannot claim the OAG’s independence while continuing to fund it as though nothing has changed.
If the Constitution has granted the Auditor-General greater institutional autonomy, that autonomy must mean something in practice. Independence without adequate resources is independence in name only.
It is not enough, then, for the Ministry of Finance to point to the OAG’s past underspending as justification for freezing its budget. That argument may hold some weight as a general budgeting principle, but the circumstances have moved on. The Auditor-General says its staffing has grown, salaries have been adjusted and its operations have expanded. Its actual expenditure in 2025/26 reached M45 million, against an estimated requirement of M67 million for 2026/27. The M30 million allocation is reportedly M8 million short of what is needed to pay staff alone. These figures demand a serious, evidence-based response – not a rehash of old spending patterns.
There is also the matter of debt. The OAG says it never received funding for the fourth quarter of 2025/26 and has carried that debt into the new financial year. A government that lets an oversight institution start the year already in the red should not be surprised when that institution struggles to function.
Government is mandated to capacitate the Auditor-General, not incapacitate it.
This matters all the more given the serious concerns already surrounding the management of Lesotho’s public finances. Audit reports are not academic exercises. They expose weaknesses that can cost the country millions, even billions, of Maloti. They give Parliament the evidence it needs to question ministers and accounting officers, and they help taxpayers understand whether public money is going where it should. Every loti spent strengthening the OAG is an investment in protecting far larger sums of public money.
National Assembly Speaker Tlohang Sekhamane appears to grasp the seriousness of the situation, having directed the Economic and Development Cluster Committee to engage the OAG and the Ministry of Finance and explore solutions, including a possible supplementary allocation. He has warned that the shortfall could undermine the OAG’s ability to discharge its constitutional mandate. That intervention must now produce results, not more delay.
Parliament must ensure the Auditor-General gets the resources it needs, while still demanding proper financial planning and accountability from the office itself. Adequate funding is not a blank cheque. The OAG must account for every loti it receives, just as it expects every other public institution to do.
But accountability cuts both ways. Government cannot demand rigorous oversight while making it practically impossible for the watchdog to operate.
The real question is not whether the Auditor-General deserves M67 million simply because it asked for that amount. It is what resources this constitutionally mandated institution objectively needs to do its job – and whether government is willing to provide them.
If the answer is no, Lesotho risks ending up with an Auditor-General that exists in law but is too financially constrained to audit government effectively. That would be a dangerous outcome.
Lesotho does not need weaker oversight. It needs stronger oversight – an Auditor-General equipped with the people, vehicles, technology, training and operational budget to follow public money wherever it leads.
Government must act swiftly to resolve this funding crisis. Parliament must insist on a sustainable funding mechanism that respects the OAG’s constitutional autonomy.
A watchdog with no means to bark, investigate or bite is nothing more than a decoration. Lesotho cannot afford one.
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