If the "African solutions for African problems" mantra is to have any real meaning, South Africa will have to stop playing Mr Nice Guy. What happened outside a farm some 32km from Maseru on Thursday was tantamount to Lesotho showing a middle finger to South Africa's diplomatic efforts.Brigadier Maaparankoe Mahao was driving out of the farm with his nephew when three Lesotho Defence Force vehicles intercepted him. What happened next is in dispute.According to Mahao's family, occupants of one of the vehicles fired three AK47 shots at him without provocation. They then forced him out of his car and fled the scene with him. He was reported dead hours later.The LDF version is that the brigadier resisted arrest and pointed a firearm at the army officers, who had come to arrest him on charges of planning a mutiny.In self-defence, the army claims, the arresting soldiers shot Mahao in his right arm and then took him to hospital, where he later died "due to over-bleeding".In case you have forgotten, Mahao was the man appointed to head the Lesotho army last year after the then army chief, Lieutenant-General Tlali Kamoli, staged a coup against the government of Thomas Thabane.The coup failed but it plunged Lesotho into a political crisis, forcing South Africa and the Southern African Development Community to intervene. Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was sent to help mediate a lasting, peaceful solution.Part of the South African-sponsored solution was fresh elections, the results of which, it was hoped, would help break the political impasse caused by a hung parliament.But, for the elections to be held in a peaceful atmosphere, it was decided that both Mahao and Kamoli would go on leave abroad for a while.It was also agreed that, after the elections, the new government would lead reforms of the security sector aimed at depoliticising the military.In the elections in February, Thabane lost the position of prime minister to Pakalitha Mosisili.Barely six months later, the peace deal brokered by South African is kaput.Mosisili wasted no time in reappointing Kamoli as army chief, despite the fact that the man had tried to remove the previous government from office illegally.Kamoli - who should be languishing in jail for that attempt - seemed to be preoccupied with rooting from the army those who had opposed his coup. He claimed to have "uncovered" a "mutiny plot" and arrested several military officers.Thabane and other opposition leaders fled the country, fearing for their lives.Ramaphosa's peace deal collapsed, clearly due to Kamoli's actions.Mosisili's complicity in all of this is apparent.This total disregard of the Ramaphosa deal by at least one party to the Lesotho conflict exposes the main weakness in South Africa's approach to conflict resolution on the continent.There is certainly merit in the preference for a political, rather than a legalistic, resolution to disputes. When this approach has worked, it has done so brilliantly. Think of the process that ended apartheid and the Sudanese negotiations that led to the birth of South Sudan.But when one or more parties to a conflict backtrack on a peace deal there is usually no mechanism for punishing them for not sticking to their word.Burundi is in the political mess it is in today because President Pierre Nkurunziza went back on a multiparty deal reached during the Great Lakes peace talks at the turn of the century. Part of the deal was that no president would serve more than two terms.South Africa, through Jacob Zuma, who was deputy president at the time, was a major sponsor of that deal. Yet today Zuma and other African leaders can only sit and watch helplessly as Nkurunziza jeopardises the stability of an entire region so he can keep the keys to State House.Just like Mosisili and Kamoli in Lesotho, Nkurunziza knows there will be no consequences when he breaks his end of the deal.As long as he holds an election, no matter how shambolic it may be, he will be accepted in the community of the continent's leaders.Mosisili, too, knows there will be no consequences for his failure to keep Kamoli on a leash and safeguard the Ramaphosa deal.If political minnows like Lesotho, which is entirely dependent on South Africa for its long-term survival, can undermine Pretoria, what of bigger countries?South Africa needs to change its approach. Push for peaceful resolution to conflicts, yes. But deals reached should be accompanied by provision for punitive measures against those who intentionally undermine what was agreed to.In Lesotho's case, South Africa should have insisted that Kamoli and other military leaders who caused the crisis in the first place be barred from holding senior positions in the army...