Tapping into Basotho 'Ethical Governance Resources' for a Decolonised AI Governance (Palgrave Handbook Ch 53)

Khali Mofuoa · 2026 · Palgrave Handbook on the Ethics of AI, ch. 53, pp. 809-824 interlocutor high priority coded

Main argument

Thesis: AI governance discourse and practice have been 'conducted in terms of the perspectives of the Global North,' misleadingly portraying it as 'an epistemological fountain of all knowledge' - a decolonised alternative can draw on Basotho 'ethical governance resources': the PITSO (public assembly - mass deliberative participation), the LEKHOTLA (court/council - adjudication and collective decision), the LEKHOTLA LA BAELETSI (council of advisors - expert counsel), and the BAHOLISI/BATATAISI (guides/mentors - formative oversight), institutions at the heart of Basotho governance since Moshoeshoe I's nineteenth-century nation-building, offered as institutional models for participatory, adjudicative, advisory, and mentoring functions in AI governance from a Global South epistemology.

Why it matters here

The most direct African-philosophy-and-AI-governance source found: Basotho institutional governance resources - the Pitso (public assembly), Lekhotla (court/council), Lekhotla la Baeletsi (council of advisors), Baholisi/Batataisi (guides/mentors) - as working models for decolonised AI governance, against the Global North's claimed epistemic monopoly. Anchors the dissertation's African-philosophy thread with concrete INSTITUTIONS, not just values-talk.

Reading notes

Close read (16pp; North-West University Business School, South Africa). Grounds the institutions in Moshoeshoe I's nation-building statecraft; sources incl. Mahao's constitutional scholarship, indigenous-knowledge and Global South AI-governance literature (Farhad 2025, Nugraha 2025). Note the deliberative-institutional register: these are PROCEDURES (assembly, council, advisors, mentors) - directly comparable to alignment assemblies and deliberative proposals.

Mofuoa, K. (2026). Tapping into Basotho 'Ethical Governance Resources' for a Decolonised AI Governance. In S. S. Gouveia (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Ethics of AI (ch. 53). Palgrave.

Close reading — 2 coded units

#1 · pp. 809 · argument

“governance discourses of these emergent AI technologies have historically been conducted in terms of the perspectives of the Global North. [...] they misleadingly portray the Global North as an epistemological fountain of all knowledge pertaining to the governance discourses and practices of these emergent AI technologies.”

TU-LITREV

#2 · pp. 812 · claim

“[Lesotho can] contribute to global AI governance through its untapped institutional 'governance resources' of the Pitso (public assembly), Lekhotla (court or council), [the Lekhotla la Baeletsi (council of advisors)], and the Baholisi or Batataisi [guides/mentors].”

RL-INST RL-LEGITIMACY

Synthesis-matrix row

Memos (1)

thesis-link · unit #2

The African-philosophy thread now has its institutional anchor. Structural observation for the dissertation: Mofuoa's four Basotho institutions map ONE-TO-ONE onto the functions the Western alignment literature reinvented from scratch - Pitso = alignment assemblies / STELA focus groups / G&K deliberation; Lekhotla = adjudication and contestability (J&N's normative interface, S&K's recourse); Lekhotla la Baeletsi = STELA's expert correctives and S&B's epistocratic layer; Baholisi = ongoing oversight/mentoring (calibration, Article 14 human oversight). The decolonial point is thus sharpened from representation to PRIORITY: the deliberative-adjudicative-advisory architecture the field converged on has centuries-old working implementations in African statecraft that the discourse never consulted. Pair with Metz's relational moral theory (values layer) and Mofuoa (institutions layer) for a two-level African contribution; connects to the corpus's Cross-Cultural category empirically. Also a candidate external contact/examiner-suggestion network node (NWU, South Africa).