Chapter three: Democracy and good political governance Objective 1: Reduce intrastate and interstate conflicts 52 i. Summary of the CSAR 133. The CSAR recognises conflict as an inevitable aspect of human interaction and as an unavoidable consequence of choices and demands. The underlying factors that have historically raised tension and precipitated violence in Lesotho are reported to be flawed leadership and political intolerance, legitimacy, identity, inequity, and poverty. These sources of conflict overlap and reinforce one another. However, the CSAR identifies political contestation as the predominant source of conflict in the country. 134. The CSAR categorises intrastate conflict in Lesotho as follows: • Political conflict, particularly the election-related disputes that led to large-scale public unrest and violence following the 1998 general elections. • Institutional conflict, which has included confrontation between armed state apparatuses and the government, and tensions between traditional governance structures and modern elected institutions. • Socioeconomic conflict, which revolves round inequity and access to economic resources and social position. Political conflict 135. Political conflict in Lesotho has manifested itself in three forms, namely as election-related conflicts, intraparty conflicts, and institutional conflicts involving various elements of the state machinery. These three types of conflict have constituted the major threats to national stability and security, to the extent even of putting national sovereignty in jeopardy. 136. The CSAR observes that election-related conflicts have been the most destabilising and have plagued the state since the years leading to the country’s independence from Britain in 1966. Results of general elections have invariably generated disputes and tension. Losing parties would habitually reject electoral outcomes, bitterly contesting the legitimacy of the process and electoral institutions and, consequently, the electoral results. The widespread postelection violence of 1998 eventually convinced all stakeholders that the winner-takes-all, FPTP electoral model was not conducive to national stability, was exclusionary and was not representative of the genuine wishes of the electorate. Opposition parties felt marginalised by a pattern of perpetual, ruling-party dominance. For example, in 1993, the winning party (the BCP) won all parliamentary seats with a majority of 67 per cent of the popular vote. Again, in 1998, the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) (a splinter party and the successor of the BCP in government) won 79 of the 80 seats, albeit with a reduced share of the popular vote. 137. In an effort to manage the conflict inherent in the FPTP electoral system, Lesotho formulated and adopted the MMP electoral model in 2001, which was in a sense a hybrid of PR and the FPTP system in that it combined the constituency vote and party-list vote. The MMP model was first used in the 2002 general elections and immediately promised prospects of a less confrontational