Institutionalizing Corporate Governance in Lesotho: Lessons Learned

Globally, there has been a growing interest in corporate governance as a result of economic and financial mishaps and the after-effect of COVID-19 pandemic that affected all economic sectors including corporate sector. From 2005, Lesotho undertook a journey of introducing corporate governance as a national policy framework and the final document, Mohlomi Corporate Governance Code, was completed in 2021. This paper analysed documents, mainly secondary, to draw up lessons learned from the processes of institutionalising corporate governance. From the analysis, a number of lessons pertinent to successful institutionalisation of corporate governance could be drawn. First, the privatisation project in 1995 failed to observe the weak corporate governance as the main source of corporate failure. This was only acknowledged in 2005. second, reforms related to corporate governance were mooted by different organisations such as African Peer Review Mission and the World Bank yet such efforts were not linked to addressing corporate governance reforms. Third, Lesotho lacked capacity to initiate corporate governance reforms without seeking external support, mainly from donor agents. This has been demonstrated more than a decade before a corporate governance code could be finalised. This poses a risk to corporate governance implementation across the sectors.