#WeLeadComms: Malakeng Hloma

Today’s #WeLeadComms honors go to Lesotho-based communication leader Malakeng Hloma.

Some careers are built around titles. Malakeng’s has been built around a conviction: that the quality of a society’s information environment determines the quality of its democracy. Across more than two decades in media, civil society, and institutional communications, that conviction has been the constant, the roles, organisations, and platforms have simply been its vehicles.

“The work has always been the same, putting the right information in the hands of people who need it to exercise power.”

Malakeng’s public profile took shape through journalism. As a principal journalist with the Lesotho National Broadcasting Service (LNBS), the country’s public broadcaster, the work was not merely reporting, it was the daily act of making the public interest legible to a public that deserved to be informed. That grounding in public media would prove formative: it instilled a discipline about audience, accountability, and the consequential nature of what gets communicated and what does not.

Beyond the newsroom, Malakeng became a significant force in shaping the conditions under which journalism operates in Lesotho. As Chair of the Governing Council of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Lesotho, the role demanded more than advocacy, it required the strategic patience to move policy. Malakeng proved instrumental in formulating and championing Lesotho’s media policy framework, engaging government, industry, and civil society in a process that sought to anchor press freedom in institutional architecture rather than goodwill alone.

The commitment to voice extended beyond media. At the Transformation Resource Centre, Malakeng worked at the intersection of social justice and community empowerment, training youth groups, members of parliament, police, army personnel, and other groups on their rights and obligations, translating the language of human rights into something actionable for people at every level of society.

Today, as a Senior Strategic Communications professional at the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority (LHDA), Malakeng operates at institutional scale. The work has meant pioneering the organisation’s digital communications, deepening participatory engagement with affected communities, and contributing to the policy frameworks that govern how a major development institution communicates its impact and listens to the people most shaped by it.

The ambition ahead is consistent with everything behind it: communications not as message management, but as genuine infrastructure for democratic accountability, in Lesotho, and across the region.

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