Fresh trouble brewing for Lesotho’s beer industry
MASERU-FOR almost a year, the alcohol industry in Lesotho has been buckling under the massive weight of Covid-19 lockdowns.
Thrice in the last 11 months, the government of Lesotho banned the sale of alcohol in a desperate attempt to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The idea, the government says, was to free up space in hospital wards that would otherwise have been taken up by road accident victims.
Noble as that may have sounded at the time, that decision unfortunately hit the beer industry extremely hard.
At a time when the industry had barely recovered, and was still reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 lockdowns, Finance Minister Thabo Sofonea came up with another shocker: a new 15 percent levy on alcohol sales.
Lesotho Flour Mills contract terminated
MASERU-THE government will not renew Seaboard Overseas’s management contract to manage the Lesotho Flour Mills.
Seaboard has held the management contract, due to end this December, since it bought 50 percent of the milling company 20 years ago.
The government has held the other 50 percent but left the operations to the American company in an agreement that was meant to improve the company’s performance.
Yet for the past two decades Lesotho Flour Mills’ performance has been far less than stellar and dividends have not been forthcoming.
Instead, Seaboard has received more than M50 million in management contract fees while the company continued to underperform.