End of the road for Angula, two others

The road to the upcoming elections has all but ended for presidential hopeful Ally Angula and two others after
failing to meet the requirements of the Electoral Act.

Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) chairperson Elsie Nghikembua on Wednesday said Angula was short of over a thousand signatures.

“The collected signatures do not correspond with the signatures on the voter registration system. Something is not right,” said Nghikembua.

Angula on Wednesday night blamed the ECN system for being slow in entering the required signatures, an allegation the commission denied on Thursday morning.

“Functional system access was only available from 20h04 [on] Wednesday evening, making it even harder to complete the task for the regions, where the required 500 have been obtained,” she said.

Angula and her team said they captured 5 063 signatures but with functional system access granted only after 20h00, it was humanly impossible to capture all the required signatures.

“The system was not tested to assess how many days it would take to capture 7 000 names,” she added.

ECN spokesperson De Wet Siluka disputes that the issue lies with the ECN’s system.

“No, it’s not true. It’s the same system the parties are using. They will know what’s delaying them. They must just be honest,” he says.

Elsie Chen’s nomination was also rejected, after she also failed to garner 500 supporter signatures from each region of the country .
“Twelve of 14 regions were submitted, but not one region had 500 signatures,” said Nghikembua.

Chen has since gone mute and has not responded to queries by the commission, which extended her an extra 24 hours to get her house in order.

Jeremiah Kaambo, who was also hit with a rejection, emailed the commission expressing dissatisfaction, but when a letter was sent back to him for clarification, he also went quiet, Nghikembua added.

Meanwhile, all the political parties that submitted their nominations have managed to sail through.