Opinion  ·  Infrastructure & Rights

As three heads of state gathered to inaugurate the Senqu Bridge on 22 April 2026, the communities of Mokhotlong were still waiting. Waiting for relocation promised before construction began. Waiting for homes cracked by blasting to be properly repaired. Waiting for the human rights standards that justified building the bridge to be applied, with equal rigour, to their lives.

 

Advocate Mosa Letsie

Lesotho Tribune  ·  Opinion

On the 22nd April 2026, King Letsie III of the Kingdom of Lesotho, Prime Minister Ntsokoane Matekane, and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa met in Mokhotlong to co-launch the opening of the Senqu Bridge, an 825-metre extradosed cable-stayed structure rising 90 metres above the valley floor, constructed at an estimated cost of R2.4 billion, and widely celebrated as the largest and most technically ambitious bridge ever built in Lesotho.

The ceremony was framed, as such occasions invariably are, in the language of partnership and shared prosperity, a bilateral achievement said to affirm the enduring strategic relationship between two neighbouring states and to signal a new chapter in the long, complicated story of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). The speeches invoked economic development, regional integration, and water security. The photographs recorded completion. And the official narrative, carefully composed, institutionally endorsed, and politically convenient, presented this moment as evidence that the project is working exactly as it was designed to work.

What that narrative did not say is that somewhere within earshot of the ceremony, in the community of Sekokong, families are living in houses whose walls have been cracked by the same construction blasting that made the bridge possible. These are families who were promised relocation before construction began, who raised that promise repeatedly with the implementing authority, and who remain, as the bridge was inaugurated, exactly where they have always been, in homes that are no longer structurally safe, waiting for a commitment that has still not been honoured.

That gap between what was promised and what was delivered, between the precision with which the project executed its engineering ambitions and the imprecision with which it met its obligations to the communities it displaced, is not an incidental failure at the margins of an otherwise successful enterprise. It is the central human story of Phase II of the LHWP, and it is the story that the celebrations of the 22nd April were not designed to tell.

This piece attempts to tell it.

First, let us be clear

Before proceeding, it is necessary to address a mischaracterisation that official responses to community grievances have consistently deployed: that criticism of this project’s human costs is, at its core, opposition to development itself. It is not. The conflation of these two positions is intellectually dishonest, and this moment of public celebration makes it urgent to name and refuse.

The communities living in the path of the Polihali Dam and the Senqu Bridge are not anti-development. They understand that Lesotho’s water is its most significant strategic resource. They understand that the bilateral relationship with South Africa carries real fiscal consequences for this country. They understand that infrastructure of this scale involves costs that must be weighed against national benefit. Many have explicitly stated, in a formal complaint to the Independent Recourse Mechanism of the African Development Bank, that they support the objectives of Phase II and are not seeking to obstruct the project’s completion.

What they do oppose, with persistence and courage that deserves far more recognition than it has received, is the imposition of costs that are disproportionately and systematically borne by those with the least power to resist them. The benefits flow elsewhere, to the national fiscus and to the industrial economy of a wealthier neighbouring state. What they demand is not the end of development, but its integrity. That it keeps its promises. That it recognises communities as rights-holders, not administrative inconveniences. That it accounts honestly for what it takes and returns something genuinely proportionate.

 

“That is not obstruction. That is the minimum threshold of justice that any development project invoking the language of human dignity is obligated to meet.”

The distance between that threshold and the current reality in Mokhotlong is the precise measure of what remains undone.

A treaty, a project, and the people it did not consult

The Senqu Bridge does not exist in isolation. It is a component of Phase II of the LHWP, a binational infrastructure initiative whose legal foundations are anchored in the LHWP Treaty of 1986. And let us be clear: that treaty was not concluded between two democratically accountable governments negotiating in good faith on behalf of informed and consenting citizens. This is a historical fact that is rarely foregrounded in celebratory accounts of the project, but it carries real weight for any serious assessment of its legitimacy.

On one side was the apartheid government of South Africa, founded on the systematic dispossession of Black people and the denial of their political agency. On the other, a military government in Lesotho that owed its people nothing in the way of consultation, transparency, or democratic accountability. The communities of Mokhotlong, who now live with the consequences of that agreement, were not at the negotiating table. They were not asked. Their land, their water, and their way of life were committed to this project before the idea of their consent carried any political weight in either state.

The 2011 Phase II Agreement was concluded in a different era, with both governments at least formally democratic. It committed them to the construction of the Polihali Dam, a 38-kilometre transfer tunnel, and the associated road and bridge works, including the Senqu Bridge celebrated this week. The agreement also presented an opportunity to do things differently, to retrofit the project with the standards of participatory governance and rights-based planning that the democratic transition had made obligatory.

On paper, that shift is visible. Compensation policies were developed. Community liaison structures were established. Environmental and social impact assessments were conducted. Resettlement frameworks were written. The institutional architecture of accountability was, in formal terms, far more sophisticated than anything contemplated in 1986. But the real question was always this: would that architecture be realised in practice, or would it remain, like so many promises made to affected communities, impressive in design but deficient in execution?

The evidence from Mokhotlong answers that question plainly. Frameworks were written but promises were not kept. The distance between the formal commitments of the Phase II architecture and the lived reality of affected communities is not a minor implementation gap. It is a structural failure. It reflects the same deeper question that has haunted this project since 1986: who was it ultimately designed to serve, and whose interests was its institutional machinery built to protect? The language of partnership has changed. The distribution of sacrifice and benefit has not.

What the communities gave

Long before the first cable was strung across the Senqu valley, and long before the first blasting charge was detonated in the highlands of Mokhotlong, the communities living in the project area had already begun to give. Not through any act of willing generosity, but through the slow, accumulating logic of a project that treated their land, resources, and way of life as raw material to be extracted and transferred, at scale, to serve interests located elsewhere.

They gave land. Not in the abstract sense of territory measured in hectares and priced per square metre, but in the deeply particular sense of lived space. These were fields cultivated across generations; riverbanks whose seasonal rhythms were known intimately; hillsides read like texts by those who had grown up on them, whose knowledge and identity were organised around their features and demands.

Communities gave grazing pastures that were not merely economic assets but the foundation of a herding culture, one in which landscape is bound up with identity, inheritance, and social organisation as much as with livestock production. They gave forests that sustained daily life: sources of firewood, medicinal plants, wild vegetables, clay for pottery, and grasses for thatching. They gave too the ecological knowledge accumulated across generations of careful use, resources whose value cannot be captured by market terms, because they were never primarily economic.

Communities also gave their dead. More than 570 graves have already been relocated from project-affected areas, with further relocations planned as the Polihali reservoir approaches operational capacity. In the context of Basotho spiritual and cultural life, where the relationship between the living and the ancestral dead is not symbolic but constitutive of social and moral existence, the forced relocation of burial sites is not a logistical matter. It is a rupture in the fabric of community life, a form of loss that no compensation policy has been designed to address, because it falls outside the categories such policies recognise.

Approximately 5,000 hectares of land will ultimately be submerged beneath the Polihali reservoir. This figure is routinely cited in project communications as evidence of scale and ambition. But it should not be understood as a measurement of territory. It is a description of lived space, accumulated history, and embedded human meaning that will be permanently removed from the communities that have inhabited it.

The scale of what was given

570+

Graves relocated from project-affected areas

5,000 ha

To be submerged beneath the Polihali reservoir

R2.4bn

Bridge cost, while resettlement promises remain unmet

Sekokong: houses cracking while the bridge rose

In Sekokong, the human cost of this transformation is not theoretical, speculative, or confined to the register of cultural loss that official processes find it easiest to acknowledge and hardest to compensate. It is physical, immediate, and written into the material fabric of homes that have been structurally compromised by the same construction activities that produced the bridge now being celebrated as a symbol of regional progress.

Construction of the Senqu Bridge required extensive blasting operations in the surrounding landscape. This work proceeded while commitments to communities living closest to the site remained substantially unfulfilled, in direct contravention of the project’s own safeguards, which require relocation before high-risk construction begins. The blasting caused serious structural damage to homes in affected communities. Walls cracked. Foundations weakened. In some cases, houses became uninhabitable, with families unable to repair or abandon them.

When the damage was reported, the response was inadequate. Repairs were superficial and cosmetic. They concealed visible damage but did not address the underlying structural harm. Families were left living in deteriorating homes they could no longer trust to protect them.

 

“A project with the resources to spend R2.4 billion on one of the most sophisticated bridge designs in southern Africa was, at the same time, unable or unwilling to prevent the structural deterioration of the ordinary homes of the people living in its shadow.”

The bridge received the full force of the project’s institutional attention, financial investment, and technical ambition. The homes beside it received cosmetic repairs and unfulfilled promises.

What the bridge replaced and what it cannot replace

The record must also show that the Senqu Bridge was not built as an addition to the existing infrastructure of the Mokhotlong highlands. It was built as a replacement for infrastructure that the project itself is in the process of destroying. The bridge replaces an existing crossing that will be permanently submerged once the Polihali Dam is filled to operational capacity, a crossing whose loss is a direct and foreseeable consequence of the project’s own design, not an act of God or an accident of geography that the project is generously moving to mitigate.

What the project presents as a contribution to Lesotho’s infrastructure landscape is, more precisely, a partial remedy for an infrastructure deficit that the project has itself created. The framing of this compensatory engineering as a gift, rather than as the partial discharge of an obligation, reflects the same asymmetry of power and narrative that has characterised the project’s relationship with affected communities throughout its implementation.

The substitution, moreover, is incomplete in ways that the bridge, however impressive its engineering, cannot address. It will ensure continued access to Mokhotlong, Sani Pass, and surrounding highland communities once existing crossings disappear beneath the reservoir. That is an important function. But it does nothing to restore the valley that will be swallowed. It does not return lost fields to farming communities. It does not rebuild ecological systems degraded by construction. Nor does it repair the social fabric of communities held in suspension for over a decade, told to stop improving their homes, to stop planting their fields, and to defer ordinary investments in their own future because relocation was always imminent.

Communities state plainly, and on record, that they were materially better off before the project arrived. What was promised as development has, in lived experience, deepened poverty and vulnerability rather than improved conditions.

The water that moved and the water that did not

There is an irony embedded in the material conditions of life in the communities most directly affected by the LHWP. The project’s entire rationale rests on the movement of water, the transfer of hundreds of millions of cubic metres per year from the Orange-Senqu River system to the water-stressed industrial economy of Gauteng. That transfer is contractually guaranteed, precisely measured, and protected by an international treaty whose terms both governments have consistently prioritised.

Yet the communities who live alongside the very infrastructure that makes this transfer possible do not experience that same reliability. In documented instances, access to clean water has deteriorated as a direct consequence of the project. Streams once used for domestic purposes have been polluted by blasting debris and construction runoff. Traditional water sources have been cut off by new roads and project fencing, altering patterns of access without providing adequate alternatives.

Women and girls, who bear the primary responsibility for domestic water collection in these communities, now walk longer distances to more distant and less reliable sources, in conditions of greater physical exposure and personal risk, to secure the most basic requirement of household survival.

 

“A project whose entire purpose is the export of water from Lesotho’s highlands has made water materially harder to access for the highland communities who live at its source.”

The women who were never counted

Any serious understanding of how harm is distributed in this project must confront its gendered dimensions directly. The evidence from the project area is clear: the costs have not been shared equally. They have fallen most heavily on women, and most acutely on those already in vulnerable positions, elderly women, widowed women, women with disabilities, and young girls navigating social environments made more dangerous by the project.

The “head of household” model used in compensation frameworks reflects the patriarchal structure of customary land tenure in Lesotho’s highlands, where women are positioned as dependants rather than independent rights-holders. In practice, it has excluded many women from receiving direct compensation for land and assets they have managed and depended on for years. Compensation is directed to male relatives, who may or may not share it. Women who have farmed the same fields for decades, who have built and sustained their households, are left with nothing in their own name, and no independent basis from which to rebuild.

In communities where large, male-dominated construction workforces have disrupted social life and intensified economic vulnerability, young girls have faced exploitation, including sexual exploitation, with serious and lasting consequences. Phase I of the project, completed two decades earlier, produced clear evidence of these same patterns. Phase II was designed with that knowledge available. And yet, the gender-responsive measures needed to interrupt these patterns were not meaningfully developed, implemented, or enforced. That is not a failure of knowledge. It is a failure of political and institutional will.

So when we ask who has really paid the price for the R2.4 billion Senqu Bridge, we must look directly at the rural women and girls of Mokhotlong. They have paid the most. They have received the least. And yet, as heads of state gathered to inaugurate a structure of immense cost and prestige, their sacrifice was not part of the story that was told.

What genuine partnership looks like

The Senqu Bridge is, by any objective engineering standard, a remarkable achievement. It is a structure of genuine technical ambition, built in conditions of considerable difficulty. It will provide lasting value for the connectivity of the Mokhotlong highlands and will stand as evidence of what the bilateral partnership between Lesotho and South Africa can produce when its institutional resources are fully mobilised behind a well-defined objective.

The LHWP also generates real benefits. It produces royalties that contribute meaningfully to the Lesotho fiscus, generates hydroelectric power that reduces the country’s dependence on expensive imported energy, and sustains an economic relationship with South Africa that, whatever its asymmetries, carries tangible value for a country whose geography and limited resource base make regional integration a necessity rather than a choice. None of this is in dispute. And none of this is what the communities of Mokhotlong are asking to undo.

What is in dispute, and validly so, is whether the value this project generates is being produced in a manner consistent with the rights of the communities who make it possible through their sacrifice. Partnership, in any usage that takes human rights seriously, is not measured in agreements signed in diplomatic settings. It is not measured in engineering achievements or aggregate economic gains. It is measured in the daily lived experiences of the people most affected by it. In whether the promises made to them are kept. In whether costs they bear are acknowledged and fairly compensated. In whether their voices are heard and their grievances are met with remedies that work.

By that measure, what exists in Mokhotlong is not yet a partnership.

Development done right would look like this

Meaningful consultation before commitments are enshrined in international treaties negotiated without community participation.

Resettlement promises kept before construction begins, not after the bridge is ready for its ceremony.

Women recognised as independent rights-holders whose entitlement to compensation is grounded in their own agency, not in the gender hierarchies of customary law.

Guaranteed access to clean water for communities living at the source of the water being exported.

Environmental degradation treated as a breach requiring remedy, not as a temporary inconvenience to be quietly absorbed by the communities who live with it.

Because as the ribbon was cut on the 22nd April, the communities of Mokhotlong were still waiting. Waiting for compensation that was promised and has not come. Waiting for water they can reach without risking harm. Waiting for resettlement that was announced over a decade ago and remains incomplete. Waiting, above all, for the recognition that they are not the backdrop against which development is performed for the cameras, but its intended purpose and its most essential test.

The R2.4 billion bridge stands solid, precisely engineered, and ready to be celebrated by governments that can point to it as evidence that the partnership is working. But the gap it represents, between what was promised and what was delivered, between the precision of its engineering and the imprecision of its obligations to the communities it displaced, is not a gap that engineering can close, however ambitious, however expensive, and however beautifully the bridge rises above the valley.

 

“That gap is closed by justice. By compensation paid in full. By relocation conducted with dignity. By women recognised as rights-holders. By complaints answered with remedy. By communities treated as partners in their own development rather than as a cost of someone else’s.”

The communities of Mokhotlong are not asking for the bridge to come down. They are asking for the same standards that justified building it, the human rights standards, the safeguard standards, and the basic standards of dignity and proportionality that both governments formally endorse, and that the international development banks financing this project are legally obligated to enforce, to be applied with the same rigour, the same ambition, and the same institutional commitment to their lives as have been applied to the structure celebrated on the 22nd April.

That is not anti-development. That is what development owes.

Until that debt is honoured, until the communities of Mokhotlong can stand beside their leaders on a bridge and say, with honest conviction, that what was taken from them was proportionate to what they received in return, what was celebrated on the 22nd April was not partnership. It was completion. And completion, for the communities who paid the price, is not the same thing as enough.

About the author

Advocate Mosa Letsie writes in a personal capacity. Views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the position of the Lesotho Tribune or its editorial.