On 6 October 2026, a LESCOSAA official gave Lesotho’s state news agency a specific number and a specific plan. Royalty collection had started in January 2025, Relebohile Tsoamotse said, and the society had hoped to pay out its first-ever distribution to musicians this year. Slow uptake had pushed that back. “Next year will be the first distribution,” he told the Lesotho News Agency (LENA), “then quarterly distribution payouts will be made.” It was the first time anyone from the Lesotho Copyright Society of Authors and Artists had put a year on the country’s first royalty cheque, and a cadence after it.
Three weeks later, a different outlet quoted the same official on the same question, and the number was gone. In reporting published by Newsday on 2 November 2026, Tsoamotse, named there with his full title, LESCOSAA’s Membership and Documentation Manager, said only this: “The licensing has taken place, the collecting also and now we are finalizing systems that will allow us to pay artists.” No year. No quarter. Just systems, still being finalised, with no date attached to when they would be done.
Neither report has him asked to square the two statements. This record does not resolve which one is the more accurate picture of where LESCOSAA actually stands. It sets them next to each other, three weeks apart, because the gap between a commitment with a year on it and a commitment with no date at all is, on its own, the story of what “soon” is worth from a statutory body that has never yet paid anyone.
What LESCOSAA actually is, and what it is not#
LESCOSAA operates under Section 31 of Lesotho’s Copyright Order of 1989 (Order No. 13 of 1989), with the Copyright Regulations of 2015 filling in how a licensing body is meant to work. It is, by its own and the government’s description, the only officially recognised collective management organisation in the kingdom. A government-gazetted tariff from 2024 fixes what commercial users, bars, taxi operators, broadcasters, venues, owe for playing music in public. None of that is in dispute anywhere in the reporting this desk checked.
What LESCOSAA is not, on the record available, is a body that has ever distributed a single royalty to a single artist. Licensing only began in January 2025. As of the most recent reporting checked, in early November 2026, no registered musician had received a payment. About 220 artists had registered as of August 2026, against an estimated 2,000 working musicians in the country, though an October 2025 figure of 237 members sits oddly against that later, lower number; neither report checked here explains the difference, and this record does not guess at one. A once-off M100 registration fee and, for commercial users, an annual licence (one DJ told LENA he paid M2,300) are the only concrete figures anywhere in this record. There is no published collection total, for any year, in any currency.
The promise, in full#
The 6 October statement is worth reading at length because it is the only time a named LESCOSAA official has put a year and a frequency on paper. “We were hoping to have royalties distributed this year,” Tsoamotse told LENA, in an interview published as part of the agency’s coverage of Lesotho’s sixtieth anniversary of independence, “however, due to slow adaptation, we are to pay out next year.” He then added the detail that made the statement more than a vague reassurance: “Then quarterly distribution payouts will be made.” Read plainly, that is a commitment to a specific year, 2027, and a specific cadence after it, four payments a year, going forward.
That statement resolved cleanly when this desk checked it directly against LENA’s own site: the page loaded in under ten seconds, comfortably inside the window this publication requires before treating a claim as verifiably sourced. A separate, earlier LENA piece, published in August 2026 and carrying LESCOSAA chief executive Advocate Maema Chaka’s fullest public account of the society’s registration process and its reasoning for holding unclaimed royalties for three years, did not resolve inside that same window on a direct check from this desk’s own server, so it is treated here as background reading, not as this record’s primary citation, even though its content appears consistent with everything else on file.
The walk-back, in full#
The Newsday piece published 2 November 2026 is framed as a profile of how Basotho musicians actually make money, live shows, bookings, direct commercial deals, since royalties have not yet entered the picture. Tsoamotse’s quotes in it read less like an update on the October promise than like a reset to an earlier, less specific stage. “For many artists and Basotho in general, we have been getting questions from people who want to know where is the money and when distribution will begin,” he is quoted saying, before describing the answer as a work in progress: “The licensing has taken place, the collecting also and now we are finalizing systems that will allow us to pay artists.”
That is not necessarily a contradiction of the October statement; “finalising systems” could be exactly the work that has to happen between now and a 2027 payout. But the reporting does not say that. It simply drops the year and the quarterly plan altogether, in favour of a sentence that could describe almost any point between now and whenever LESCOSAA eventually does pay someone. The same Newsday piece quotes Nishal Lalla, finance director of the Recording Industry of South Africa, telling a Maseru music conference in September 2026 that the onus was on musicians, not the society, to chase payment: “LESCOSAA does not have to come after you guys, you must go to them.” Whether that reflects the same slowdown behind the vaguer November language, or a separate point about artist registration, this record could not establish.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Basotho musician, nothing here changes the basic calculation: LESCOSAA is the only legal channel for collecting Lesotho’s statutory public-performance and broadcast royalties, and registering with it, ID, banking details, next-of-kin information, a once-off M100 fee, remains the only way to be in line for a payment if and when one is made. But treat any date attached to that payment, including the one given on 6 October 2026, as provisional rather than scheduled. The society’s own named official gave a year and a quarterly cadence in one interview and declined to repeat either in another, three weeks later, with no public explanation for the change in between.
If you licence Basotho repertoire from outside the country, LESCOSAA’s tariff structure is real and its reciprocal arrangements with foreign collecting societies may eventually matter for cross-border use, but there is no evidence yet that the society has the operational capacity to actually administer a payout on either side of that relationship. Direct clearance with the rights holder remains the more reliable route for now.
Lesotho’s experience is not unusual among small, statutory collecting societies on this continent. Niger’s BNDA told musicians a payout was coming “soon” in February 2026, then followed up three months later with a workshop about the law instead of a number. Liberia’s own copyright authority has told artists, at their own payout events, that the money handed out was welfare rather than royalties, and Burundi’s collecting society has said for years it will tell musicians “as soon as the office is ready”, with no distribution total ever published. What distinguishes Lesotho’s case is how fast the specific gave way to the vague: a named year and a named frequency in early October, reduced to an undated “finalizing systems” by the first week of November, from the same official, with nothing in between to explain the change.