Namibia, quo vadis?
By Christiaan Keulder
As it turned out, the 2024 presidential and National Assembly election was a watershed. But for all the wrong reasons.
Never in its democratic history has Namibia’s election management been this shambolic, and never before have citizens had to endure so much physical and emotional distress just to cast a vote. These elections have brought the nation to a crossroads, requiring it to reflect on the pathway of its democratic dispensation. It is simply impossible to have democracy without credible, free and fair elections. By the looks of it, it may take a court to decide whether or not the 2024 election was free and fair.
The Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) has shown a complete lack of skill or understanding of even the most basic requirements of reputation management. It stopped communicating when information was demanded and has not taken responsibility for its obvious failures.
Nor has it apologised to those who had to endure discomfort and exposure to the elements while queuing for hours to cast their vote.
In this process, they failed to control the media agenda, creating space for mis- and disinformation campaigns to proliferate. More chaos, less trust. It will not be surprising if many Namibians today believe Zanu-PF muddled our elections. But more importantly, how are we seen by others, our peers and those about to invest in the country?
Restoring trust imperative
Afrobarometer Round 10 data collected in March this year showed that public confidence in the ECN has reached its lowest point since the start of the survey in 1999. In the decade between 2014 and 2024, trust declined from 74.1% to just 44.7%. The events of this election will not only further erode public trust in the election management body, but it will also impact public perceptions that these elections were free and fair.
The number of Namibians believing that their elections are “not at all” free and fair more than tripled between 2017 (9%) and 2024 (28%). During the same period, those believing that elections were “completely free and fair” declined by 23 points, from 59% to 36%.
And although we’ll have to wait for another survey to assess the exact extent of the damage to the ECN’s reputation, urgent action is required, seeing that the 2025 Regional Council and Local Authority elections are looming large amidst this crisis.
It is, therefore, imperative to launch an investigation into the conduct of the ECN and take action if we were to restore trust in our elections and those who manage them.
Failure to do so will be seen as a passive endorsement of a flawed process. This may lead to large tracts of voters disengaging from elections and becoming dissatisfied with democracy as a preferred system of governance. This is most likely to happen to the youth cohort and first-time voters for whom this must have been a deplorable experience.
Reform the electoral system
However, these elections also highlighted numerous problems that require investigation beyond the ECN and their seeming inability to organise and manage efficient elections.
Namibia needs to rethink its electoral system. The current proportional representation (PR) system with the largest remainders was adopted to ensure maximum inclusivity, i.e., to make it easy for small parties to gain representation.
That may well have suited the objective of the immediate post-colonial period, which aimed to include even small minorities, but that is no longer the most important objective. The system has created a hyper-fragmented party system characterised by many small ethno-regional parties that clutter the political landscape but offer little substance other than to make the party system unstable.
The Proportional Representation (PR) system has another important consequence. Asking voters to vote for a list of representatives rather than individual candidates who live among them invariably weakens the relationship between voter and representative.
In 2024, an Afrobarometer survey found that only 16% of adult Namibians believed members of parliament were in touch with what ordinary people say, and 41% approved of MPs performing their jobs; add to this the low levels of trust, and there is evidence of a definite disconnect between voters and representatives. It is a problem that needs to be solved.
Not by adopting a simple majoritarian system with single-member districts, as such a system has unwanted tendencies to ‘manufacture’ majorities, but by looking at systems such as the Additional Member System (AMS) or Single Transferable Vote (STV) system that combines local representation with proportionality.
The election playing field is not level. Public resources to parties are allocated proportionally, and first-time contestants and unrepresented parties cannot access public resources. With little to no member contributions, most political parties rely on the taxpayer to stay afloat. This means that legislation needs to be introduced to 1) bring about a more equitable formula for distributing public resources to qualifying parties and 2) to implement much stricter oversight of party finances and funding. We also need a legal threshold for representation to curtail the proliferation of small ethno-regional parties at the national level.
Lift the bar
All aspects of the electoral process, including the electoral calendar and the timing of elections, need to be reviewed. With the ECN seeming unable to process 1.4 million voters in a single day (roughly the number of voters in the Orange Free State, or 5% of the entire South African voting population), the decrepit state of our democratic institutions is painfully obvious to see. Brazil announced the results of their 2010 presidential election a mere 75 minutes after its conclusion, counting 135 million votes using electronic and online voting. Despite various contentions, technology will become the norm; perhaps now is the time to re-investigate the options.
All political parties should be required to re-register before each election. The practice whereby parties remain registered allows very small parties without significant and meaningful national support to contest elections. Most presidential candidates in this election will not muster 5% support, and only about five of the 21 parties will do the same. These small parties are not rooted in social segments, nor do they add value to the legislative process. If anything, they are little more than a platform for leaders seeking parliamentary employment. The bar should be lifted, and the criteria for inclusion should be more stringent to ensure political parties become more viable entities capable of having a meaningful impact on the legislative process.
The problem with electoral reform is that those who benefit from the status quo are those who design and implement it. As a result, there is usually very little political will to bring about change, making this an onerous process. Calls for change will likely have to come from political parties and civil society, which campaign for the expansion and protection of the public good, democracy. And the ruling party should join the reform. After all, at the current rate of diminished support, the tide may have turned against them come 2029, and they will be exposed to the perils of the current system as a member of the opposition.
*Christiaan Keulder is a Namibian political analyst, research specialist and the founder of Survey Warehouse.