The final outcome of Namibia’s botched national and presidential elections last year still hangs in the balance, with a loose coalition of nine opposition parties having lodged an application with the High Court of Namibia to have yet another claimed Swapo landslide set aside as null and void.
On December 24 the court awarded them their first legal victory when Judge Parker Collins ruled that the Election Commission of Namibia had to hand over election materials for an audit. The court also awarded costs to the usually cash-strapped parties, nominally led by the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP).
On January 4 they lodged another application to have the results — which gave Swapo an unlikely 75% victory — nullified, or to obtain a recount of specific constituencies.
In terms of the Election Act a date for a court hearing must be set within 60 days. It would take place as soon as possible thereafter, an advocate said.
In unusually disciplined fashion the opposition parties have been playing their cards close to their chest after receiving audited results from 50 out of 107 constituencies, declining to comment on the issues raised in their pleadings, in line with the sub judice rule.
At the heart of the dispute are issues such as the hugely inflated voters’ roll, the system of tendered ballots (people voting outside their home constituencies) and the systematic ignoring of provisions on how the vote should be counted.
In its first application, heard on December 23, the RDP’s Libolly Haufiku raised the issue of a wildly inaccurate voters’ roll with an implausibly high number of voters, which he said had led to turnouts as high as 191% in the wealthy urban constituency of Windhoek East.
This was plausible if there was a commensurate decline in the rural northern constituencies. However, many turnouts there ranged from 104% to 136%, Haufiku said.
In the weeks immediately before the elections the Election Commission of Namibia issued three different voters’ rolls in which the numbers differed by as much as 477 000 votes in a population of 2.1million people.
Even the final roll issued the day before the elections contained gross errors: although the commission insisted there were 1163000 voters, a count showed only 820 344 names on the roll.
The opposition has established that even among the 820 344 voters, there were about 58 000 ghost voters, and about 90 000 were older than 110 years. Another 19 000 people not on the roll also voted, The Namibian newspaper reported this week.
The audit revealed that some of the inspected ballots apparently originated from a different printer, and elsewhere counterfoils for used ballots that contained no serial numbers were found.
The commission was forced to change the printer for the election materials after it awarded the job to a Swapo-owned firm, earning the vitriol of Swapo secretary general Pendukeni Iivula-Ithana.
The commission’s director, Moses Ndjarakana, has been forced to go on “indefinite leave” under pressure from Swapo, whereas spokesperson Theo Mujoro appeared to prefer to remain in the United States.
Iivula-Ithana, also the justice minister, who had harsh public words for Judge Parker, later proclaimed that the ruling party was prepared to repeat its performance. Rumours that opposition parties had obtained 37 to Swapo’s 35 seats in the 72-seat National Assembly were rubbish, she said.