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Lines stretchedNNNSWAPOSWAPO IPCSWAPONNNIPC SWAPO IPC IPC SWAPO SWAPOSWAPO SWAPOSWAPO SWAPO Your browser does not support the element. around the block, motionless, as voters stood for hours in the searing heat of a Namibian summer, waiting for ballot papers. On November 27th, long after voting had begun in the country’s presidential and parliamentary elections, over a third still lacked election materials. Thousands went home without casting their vote. Then the electoral commission announced it would extend voting in some polling stations for three more days. Voters returned, multiple times. “It’s like you are a mad person,” one frustrated citizen told local media.Finally, six days later, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, known as , was declared president, with 58% of the vote. As leader of , the party that has ruled Namibia since independence in 1990, she held off a challenge by Panduleni Itula, a 67-year-old dentist, lawyer and former youth campaigner, who spent 33 years in Britain before coming back home in 2013. With 15 candidates competing, he got 26% of the vote as head of the Independent Patriots for Change ().In February this year, President Hage Geingob, a stalwart, died in office. He was replaced by an interim president, who then handed the presidential candidacy to the 72-year-old , Namibia’s vice-president. Educated in the Soviet Union and Britain, she is married to a former head of Namibia’s armed forces. She will be Namibia’s first female head of state.Her victory, however, has been sorely marred by the failings of the electoral commission. The called the voting extension illegal and criticised it for reopening only some polling stations, without explaining how they were selected. There were reports that had been bringing its supporters by bus to the polling stations that had reopened. The is refusing to recognise the results and says it will “pursue justice through the courts”. On December 3rd, when the result was declared, opposition parties led by the boycotted the announcement.As results stand, Ms Nandi-Ndaitwah faces an uphill task. lost 12 seats in the parliament, putting it well below the two-thirds-threshold needed to pass legislation. So she will have to cosy up to opposition parties, themselves a fractured group. In the previous two general elections ’s tally had already dropped from 87% to 65%. This time it got just 53%.Namibians are frustrated by falling living standards and rising corruption. Many of the country’s 3m-odd people are short of basic housing. Two-thirds of urbanites live in shanty towns. Unemployment is stubbornly high. From next year the daily minimum wage for farm workers will be ten Namibian dollars (55 American cents).The government has been increasingly blamed for the poverty. Namibia is the second-most unequal country in the world, just ahead of neighbouring South Africa, according to World Bank numbers from 2022. Of the 1.4m Namibians registered to vote, more than half were born after independence, so many felt no residual gratitude to for winning it from South Africa. In the run-up to the elections an air of expectation was heightened by the defeat or decline of time-worn ruling parties in neighbouring Botswana and South Africa that were deemed to have succumbed to corruption over too many years in office.has likewise been dogged by allegations of corruption. The so-called Fishrot scandal, which was exposed in 2019 and is still dragging on, brought a clutch of ministers to court and prison, revealing a web of bribery and chicanery in the fishing industry, a big chunk of Namibia’s economy. According to Afrobarometer, a continental pollster, two-thirds of Namibians believe corruption has risen in the past year. New oil finds and plans to harness Namibia’s wind and solar energy to create green hydrogen have yet to benefit ordinary Namibians. Oil reserves being tapped by TotalEnergies and Shell are not expected to begin flowing until 2030.So it is surprising, to say the least, that Ms Nandi-Ndaitwah beat the dentist by so wide a margin. In any event, she will start her presidency under a cloud of doubt and has a hard task ahead.
