Same song and dance.
Bonno
Highlands district
April 4, 2023
Lesotho has been praised for the rapid expansion of their domestic cannabis industry, now valued at more than $ 92 million.
But Lesotho locals, who have grown cannabis informally for centuries say government’s rosy-images cut them out of the picture.
“Licensing is pegged at $27,000. The fees are so unthinkable that we can only watch Westerners and their chosen local elites enter the medical cannabis farming sector,” says Harold Sekopane, an unlicensed Lesotho cannabis grower in the water-rich Lesotho Highlands district.
Lesotho’s dark black soils, its very high elevation as a country and its lavish freshwater reserves makes it the ideal choice for a cannabis farmer looking for geographic conditions that makes farming easier.
However, Samuel Molemo, a tribal chief in the Highlands district, tells Cannabis Culture that: “There’s a lot of untruths in foreign corporations who promise rural villagers shares in their companies for permission to grow cannabis in their districts only to hand the shares to politically connected city-based elites, usually senior government officials.” The Guardian too has reported on a phenomenon where it is alleged that multinationals from Canada, South Africa or the EU have cornered the cannabis scene in Lesotho and crowded out locals who, on paper, were supposed to benefit from cannabis liberalization in Lesotho.
“Sometimes ill-informed Lesotho rural villagers take money to allow foreign cannabis growers to plant on their land only to realize they have signed massively unfair deals when cultivation and exports boom off their lands,” says Sello Mkalane, a Lesotho agriculture extension officer.
There is an ongoing high-profile dispute in Lesotho involving Akanda Corp, a Nasdaq-listed medical cannabis entity, over allegations to do with land grab claims and shortchanging locals in cannabis equity ownership.
“Despite our lands being the theatre of cannabis cultivation, we are so poor that the best we can do is to pitch at the premises of big cannabis cultivators every morning hoping to grab a farm job that pays $200/month,” Zama Mawisa, a Lesotho small-time grower who gave up and has since been looking for a cannabis-leaf grader job because his own attempt to cultivate the crop has gone nowhere.
Cannabis Culture has previously reported that Lesotho’s domestic cannabis scene is Africa’s most thrilling.
It has not only grabbed the mantle of launching Africa’s first cannabis contract- farming model but it has attracted serious players from afar as Canada.
However, as Bonno revealed under the so-called boom has seen a significant number of the harvest of unlicensed farmers being smuggled across the border to South Africa.
Lesotho police say for Lesotho’s unlicensed cannabis growers, smuggling is more lucrative than joining the formal system because a kilogram of cannabis in Lesotho sells for $7 a gram with 25% going to tax.
Over the border in South Africa, when smuggled, it fetches $13 with zero tax paid.
“These are the consequences of prioritizing foreign cannabis corporation and not properly empowering domestic Black cannabis growers in Lesotho with quicker licensing, bank loans, harvest storage, farming subsidies and export value chain training, Nadine Bwalya, a security consultant for the Indoor Cannabis Farmers Alliance of Johannesburg in next-door South Africa where most of Lesotho’s smuggled cannabis lands.
“For those marginalized from the corporate cannabis scene, smuggling is the fallback option.”
Lesotho government says it is on a learning curve and working hard to make sure its fledgling cannabis industry doesn’t become the ‘resource curse.’ The ‘resource curse’ is an acronym for African countries that discover lucrative natural resources only for deadly conflict to develop over scramble for controlling those resources.
“From 2023 – we hope to unveil new model whereby foreign corporate cannabis grower will only start operations here in Lesotho if they share 2% of their local equity to trusts managed by rural dwellers. The proposal will be tabled to parliament soon. It’s not enough to simply say, we’ll employ locals in 80% of cannabis grading or plants-watering jobs,” says Fani Majolo, a state official responsible for investors’ regulatory compliance in Lesotho’s finance ministry.
‘We are saying: bring your cannabis investment money to Lesotho – but it’s not enough to
simply pay minimum corporate tax and do nothing more.” Harold Sekopane, says he feels the
government cannabis investors’ equity reforms are high-sounding but empty. “We have heard it
before.”
“What you will see is that the equity donated by foreign cannabis companies will go to children of state officials. To be honest – the government of Lesotho would slash extortionist cannabis license fees tomorrow if their promises are based on goodwill.”
