The Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) has expressed its reservations about the Electoral Commission of Namibia’s (ECN) ability to run free, fair and credible election this November.
President Hage Geingob has declared the 27th of November 2019 a public holiday to allow for the elections as per Section 64 (6) of the Electoral Act, 5 of 2014.
RDP president Mike Kavekotora claimed that due to financial problems at the ECN, its ability to hold elections this year was questionable.
“Already ECN has started to complain about the lack of funds and I don’t know how they are going to run a prudent election. You have to have all the resources at your disposal if you want to run a credible election which is something that government has been yearning for a long time now.
“So I think if the issue of money is coming up now then its prudent for the executive government to do something now to give us the assurance that come this November we are going to have free, fair and credible election.
“Because if you don’t have resources to conduct those elections in a fair and credible manner, then the best thing for you is to reassess the relevance of holding the elections in November, because otherwise you will have to cut corners an some of the Namibians will suffer as a result of that and we don’t want things to be done in a haphazard manner,” he said.
ECN chief electoral officer has, however, said that they were quite happy with the new 200 000 voters that registered a few weeks ago during the supplementary voters’ registration.
RDP also decried voter apathy.
He said youth that were not voting “because they do not see any change” was a “big mistake”.
“There has been voter apathy for a long time. Judging from the number of people who registered and the recently held registration process, I was not happy about the information that I am getting from the ground, there were instances where some of the people were simply left out.
Left out in the sense that you come to a registration point and people are just telling you we ran out of registration cards, which is simply just robbing those individuals of their democratic rights,” said the politician.
Kavekotora claimed that as per their findings, there were some places where the ECN simply did not go or spent very little time.
“When people showed up ECN was already gone. So basically those are some of the issues that we still want to take up with ECN for them to understand that there is still a need, maybe in September, to still go out for another supplementary registration because there is a vast number of Namibian people who want to participate and exercise their democratic right,” he said.
