72-year-old Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah has been declared the President of Namibia. Nandi-Ndaitwah who was the candidate of the ruling SWAPO party was declared winner on Tuesday following last week’s disputed elections.
By the announcement, Nandi-Ndaitwah become the first woman president in the history of the southern African country.
The announcement came after a disputed vote that the main opposition has already said it does not recognize.
According to reports, Vice-President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah took just over 57 percent of ballots. Followed by the candidate for the main opposition Independent Patriots for Change (IPC) with 25.5 percent, the election authority announced.
Nandi-Ndaitwah, 72, becomes the first woman to rule the mineral-rich southern African country. Namibia has been governed by the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) since independence in 1990.
Recall that the November 27 presidential election was extended twice due logistical and technical problems. The election also suffered shortages of ballot papers, which led to long queues of voters.
“Some voters gave up on the first day of voting after waiting for up to 12 hours,” AFP reported.
Following the development, the opposition, IPC, said it was a deliberate attempt to frustrate voters. It, therefore, insisted that it would not accept the results of the elections.
This is even as IPC presidential candidate, Panduleni Itula, 67, said last week there were a “multitude of irregularities”.
No matter the result, “the IPC shall not recognize the outcome of that election”, he said on Saturday, the last day of the extended vote.
Itula maintained that the IPC would “fight… to nullify the elections through the processes that are established within our electoral process”.
Also an organization of southern African human rights lawyers serving as election monitors said the delays at the ballot box were intentional and widespread.
This is even as the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) admitted to failures in the organization of the vote. The Commission noted that there was a shortage of ballot papers and the overheating of electronic tablets used to register voters.
Of the nearly 1.5 million registered voters in the sparsely populated country, “nearly 77 percent had cast ballots in the presidential vote,” ECN said Tuesday.
AFP reports that the election was seen as a key test for SWAPO after other liberation-era movements in the region have lost favour with young voters.
Recall that in the past six months, South Africa’s African National Congress, ANC, lost its parliamentary majority. And the Botswana Democratic Party, BDP, was ousted after almost six decades in power by the opposition.
Namibia is a major uranium and diamond exporter but analysts say not many of its nearly three million people have benefited from that wealth in terms of improved infrastructure and job opportunities.
Unemployment among 15- to 34-year-olds is estimated at 46 percent, according to the latest official figures from 2018, which is almost triple the national average.
Nandi-Ndaitwah, a SWAPO stalwart known by her initials NNN, will be among the few women leaders on the continent.
The conservative daughter of an Anglican pastor, she became Vice President in February this year.
Recognizable by her gold-framed glasses, she has tried to vaunt the wisdom of her years during the campaign. Where she was often wearing blue, red and green, the colours of her party and of the national flag.
Among her election promises, NNN said she intends to “create jobs by attracting investments using economic diplomacy,” AFP
source: AFP
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