Lesotho is ready for business

Lindi met Mme Kanono at the France and South Africa business forum in September, and was told then that big things were coming between South Africa and Lesotho. When the date was fixed she got her on the line, with listeners tuning in from the UK, Spain, Germany and Belgium as well as home. Lindi's own roots are in Lesotho, which is part of why this conversation mattered to her.

A lawyer who calls her work fun

Asked what she does for fun, Mme Kanono said she thinks her work is fun, and the day backed her up. While she was on the line she was attending a nuclear energy conference opened by South Africa's Minister of Electricity and Energy, there to push for women to enter the nuclear space.

She has been a lawyer since 2010. Six years of criminal law came first, then international law at Lesotho's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, negotiating bilateral and multilateral agreements under the UN, the African Union and SADC, which took her around the world. Around 2012 she studied nuclear law in France, because Lesotho wanted to join the International Atomic Energy Agency in Austria and needed the law and a regulator to go with it. More than 250 Basotho have since been trained across different areas of nuclear technology, and Lesotho now has its own regulatory authority. Her example was cancer treatment with radiotherapy. Her masters in international trade and investment law came from the University of Vienna, and she says she chose it because she wanted her work as an international lawyer to land in the lives of ordinary Basotho. From there she was posted to South Africa as Deputy High Commissioner.

Why a forum for the diaspora

This is the second Lesotho Diaspora Investment and Trade Forum. The first was last year, and a similar one was held in London about three weeks before the interview. Her reasoning is that countries everywhere are reaching out to the nationals who live and work abroad, and that Lesotho should too. Sending money home is fine, she said, but there are other ways in: government programmes run with banks and the private sector, investment, joint ventures, partnerships, or simply coming back to mentor. The aim is to leave what she called generational wealth for the families back home.

That question is the quiet centre of the whole forum. It is also why she wants South Africans in the room. Basotho who live here have built networks and businesses with local people, and she asked them to bring those partners along so that similar ventures can be set up in Lesotho.

What there is to invest in

The Lesotho National Development Corporation, the body mandated to coordinate investment and trade, was due at the forum with a set of projects. Agriculture came first. Lesotho imports a lot of food it could grow, from cabbage and carrots to onions and mushrooms, and the invitation is to build crop processing facilities and to reach markets the government has already negotiated.

Then the mountains. Lesotho needs three, four, five and even six star accommodation, and Mme Kanono is blunt with Basotho who grew up believing success lives in the cities: the mountains are a gem, and foreigners have already built a five-star resort up there. The Minister of Tourism was expected in the room, along with the Lesotho Tourism Development Corporation. A third agency, which supports small and medium enterprises, would present projects that suit smaller players.

Farming in a hotter year

Lindi raised the heat wave and El Nino, because small farmers are the ones who feel it first. Mme Kanono said Lesotho is moving to climate-smart agriculture: irrigation systems, and seed varieties that tolerate drought and heat, some of them developed with nuclear techniques, which tied neatly back to the conference she was sitting in. These programmes run through Lesotho's Ministry of Agriculture, together with South Africa's Department of Agriculture and with help from the EU and the US, and they train Basotho farmers in current ways of farming. They are among the projects the diaspora would be shown at the forum.

Women, money and choices

Lindi's last question gave her room to breathe, and she took it. She accepts every invitation to speak to women and young girls, and what she hands over is the know-how for financial freedom.

Choosing a partner, choosing a job, getting out of a bad relationship, she said, all become easier. In Lesotho there are business programmes only for women, a youth programme launched by the Prime Minister for boys and girls, some of whom are trained here in South Africa, and cohorts that join coaching programmes with South African organisations. In her own field there is a Women in Nuclear chapter pushing young women into science and technology, with exchange programmes with South Africa. She expects more women than men at the forum, because those are the people she tends to reach out to.

Those were her parting words, and she added the practical proof: a foreign company can be established in Lesotho within five days, entirely online, from wherever you are. Lesotho, she said, is ready for joint ventures and partnerships.

Knocking on her door

Registration for Thursday had closed by the time of the interview, so Lindi asked how people can reach her afterwards. The High Commission keeps an open door policy, Mme Kanono said, and she gets tens and tens of South African business people walking in. It is at 391 Anderson Street in Menlo Park, Pretoria. Security phones through when you arrive, but she is sometimes out of the office, so an appointment is wiser. The phone number and email address are on the High Commission's website, and a message addressed to the Deputy High Commissioner reaches her executive secretary, who sets up a face-to-face meeting.

Before they closed, Lindi asked where in Lesotho her heart lies. It is her home village in Berea, she said, a valley with beautiful rivers, where the family sometimes sits and wonders when they will build a lodge. She likes to travel in the late evening to avoid the heat, and she prefers the back roads. Lindi said they will follow this up in 2027, and that South Africans want to know where they can plug in.