Elections Require Credible Leaders

Paying lip service to the concepts of transparency and credibility will not engender trust in the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN).

Until ECN chairperson Elsie Nghikembua, her fellow commissioners, chief electoral and referenda officer Peter Shaama and his top executive appreciate that such critical ingredients of good governance transcend legal processes, they are the ones eroding trust in Namibia’s democracy – not ECN critics.

Many were willing to give Nghikembua and her team the benefit of the doubt following decades of own goals by the ECN, which have damaged the credibility of Namibia’s election process.

By the time of the bizarre incident of ballot papers ‘falling off a truck’ outside Okahandja in the late 1990s, the elections managing body was tainted by the presence of Swapo apparatchiks and spy agents being involved in collating results.

In one incident, the Okongo constituency was found to have attracted about double the number of its registered voters, all in favour of the ruling party.

An amateur attempt at massaging the result was reversed the following day after it was exposed and questioned in the media.

The ECN has not been able to recover from ineptitude, incompetence, dumb arrogance and blatant bias for decades.

Nearly every major election has been challenged all the way to the courts with judgements scathing towards the ECN though falling short of overturning the results.

Even when the commission has won on technicalities, the ECN has often come off worse because of how it handled the elections.

In the last general and presidential elections of 2019, the ECN got some of its worst censure in the Supreme Court with the ruling that electronic voting machines deployed for several polls did not meet the basic standards of transparency as they did not provide for an independent verifiable trail.

Again, legal technicalities that placed the onus on the challenging party to prove substantial rigging saved Namibia the embarrassment of having to re-do the elections.

Alas, with Nghikembuwa and Shaama having been in the system for more than 10 years, one would have thought the incompetence and dumb arrogance would have been addressed.

They even shared an election calendar with the public that provided a sense of being organised.

The clumsy deregistration of the Namibia Economic Freedom Fighters (NEFF) and Christian Democratic Voice (CDV) as political parties and subsequent loss of the court case have only set us back and reminded all and sundry that the ECN’s old and particularly bad habits will die hard.

The ECN deregistered the parties despite the attorney general advising against the move.

As if that’s not enough, the ECN is now embroiled in a controversy about awarding the printing of ballot papers in a most non-transparent fashion.

The ECN claims it has kept political parties informed about the process and why it decided to stop the open bidding to hand-picking Ren-Form to print the ballots.

While proclaiming it was transparent, the ECN does not seem to have involved any outsider to independently observe how they chose Ren-Form which, with the support of the ECN, has threatened to sue critics who questioned its alleged links with an ex-convict in Zimbabwe and suspicions of being linked to figures in a country known for rigging elections.

Namibian officials have long shown their support for Zimbabwean rulers, going as far as opposing Southern African Development Community observers who found that elections there did not meet the basic requirements of free and fair polls.

As if that was not enough, ECN commissioner Gerson Tjihenuna went to Venezuela and returned showering praises on the Maduro regime, which is widely known to have rigged several elections.

If lessons are learnt from Venezuela and Zimbabwe, which cannot put together democratic processes that provide a conducive environment for free and fair elections, how can the ECN comfortably dismiss concerns about our own polls?

Laws alone will not ensure that Namibia’s elections are fair and credible.

ECN leaders ought to appreciate they have done a lot of damage over decades and need to go the extra mile to regain public trust.

Trust and credibility go way beyond paying lip service about transparency or claiming the ECN followed the legal procedures.