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.