The Case for Demilitarising Lesotho

The Kingdom of Lesotho spends around five per cent of its annual budget - some 700 million Maloti ($US52.6 million) in 2017 - on the Lesotho Defence Force (LDF). Lesotho's geographical position means that the LDF has no meaningful role regarding its primary function of defending the country from external aggression and it hardly engages in its secondary functions. In addition, the LDF has a long history of interference with democratic processes and engaging in human rights abuse. The financial resources currently allocated to the LDF could do far more for security, widely defined, if they were allocated to a number of other government expenditure categories.