Lesotho dam authority ordered to pay 13 years of arrears to 20 community associations

Communities in Lesotho have won a major round in their long battle for compensation for losses caused by the construction of dams for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which supplies water to South Africa. The high court on 20 October ordered the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority (LHDA) to pay M89.9-million within 90 days, after 13 years of delays in paying compensation for Phase 1 of the project.

The settlement, made a court order by Acting Justice Tšebang Putsoane, provides for payments to 20 community associations, mostly from Thaba-Tseka district, of between M16.2-million and M848,000. The total has increased by 8% since 2013, when the LHDA stopped paying a second tranche of compensation. An ombudsman report released in March put Phase 1 arrears at more than M142-million at the end of 2025.

The associations relied on a landmark Court of Appeal judgment in favour of the U Khopo Maliba-Matšo Society, a group of 600 villagers based in Bobete in Thaba-Tseka that brought its own case against the LHDA. The authority paid a first tranche in 2003 and 2004 to communities and associations formed under its guidance to receive communal compensation, after communities lost grazing land, riverine ecosystems and sources of firewood, fish, wild vegetables and medicinal plants. The second tranche required a ten-year review in 2013, but the LHDA halted payments that year, later citing a consultant's monitoring report that claimed there was no evidence of compensable losses.

Advocate Rapapa Sepiriti, who represented the associations, said the LHDA eventually paid M8.2-million to the U Khopo Maliba-Matšo Society, which had received about M2.7-million in 2003. After the Court of Appeal ruling, the associations wrote to the authority in November and December 2025 to open negotiations and waited more than six months for a response before launching their own case in June 2026, prompting the LHDA to settle out of court.

The ruling does not close the wider dispute. In July 2025 more than 3,000 people and 889 businesses approached the Constitutional Court arguing that the LHDA had denied them fair compensation for land taken since the 1980s, with some families allegedly receiving as little as 78 cents per square metre for properties expropriated years before compensation was calculated. In May 2026 the Constitutional Court declined to hear the matter, holding that the LHDA Act, the Land Act and the project's compensation regulations already provided remedies in the high court and magistrates' courts. In September 2025, 18 rural communities also filed a complaint with the African Development Bank over Phase 2 of the project, which is backed by a R1.3-billion AfDB loan to the Trans-Caledon Tunnel Authority with a South African government guarantee.