JOHANNESBURG

Namibians will be heading to the polls on Wednesday to elect a new president and members of the National Assembly in a contest that experts believe could be the most competitive since independence in 1990.

Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, 72, the current vice president, is contesting as the presidential candidate of the ruling South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), which has been in power for 34 years.

There are 1.4 million registered voters in the thinly populated country of 3 million people.

Fifteen political parties are competing for the position of president as well as seats in the National Assembly.

Will Nandi-Ndaitwah become the country's first female president?

If Nandi-Ndaitwah wins Wednesday’s election, she will make history by becoming the country’s first female president.

“The possibility of Namibia's vice president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, becoming the first female president of the country could be a catalyst for a significant change in political culture in the Southern African Development Community (a regional bloc of 16 countries), where males have dominated the echelons of power since the collapse of colonial and apartheid rule,” Rich Mashimbye, a researcher at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC) at the University of Johannesburg, told Anadolu.

Mashimbye said that since Namibia attained independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, SWAPO had always fielded male candidates for the presidency.

He said the rise of Nandi-Ndaitwah in SWAPO’s ranks to the point that now she is on the cusp of becoming president of the country if the party wins the elections could contribute to a change in political culture in Namibia, where male politicians have been dominant since independence.

“Indeed, women have been in the margins of politics in postcolonial Africa, as many African societies are patriarchal, with women's place considered to be the home. As such, Nandi-Ndaitwah's rise to the highest office in Namibia can contribute to the erosion of the gender stereotypes that have erroneously assigned the responsibility of leadership to men, and men alone,” said Mashimbye.

Sikanyiso Masuku, a research fellow at the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa at the University of Cape Town, said an electoral win for Nandi-Ndaitwah would be very progressive and probably the novel case that other political parties in the region will use to gauge how competitive a female electoral candidate would be and how they would fare against a traditionally male list of political opponents.

Masuku told Anadolu that very few women in the Southern Africa region have held the high office of president. He said where they have done it, it was not through a popular vote but through a constitutional succession clause, giving the example of Samia Suluhu Hassan, the current president of Tanzania, who was vice president in 2021 and became president after the death of President John Magufuli.

He gave another example of Joyce Banda in Malawi, who assumed the presidency after the sudden death of President Bingu wa Mutharika in 2012 without being elected.

Main contenders

The main challengers of Nandi-Ndaitwah include Panduleni Itula of the Independent Patriots for Change party, who managed to get 29.4% of the vote in the 2019 election, where he ran against President Hage Geingob, who got 56.3% of the vote, a decline from the 87% that he won during his first term in 2014.

Geingob, 82, died in February, weeks after it was announced he would undergo treatment for cancer.

Other contenders include McHenry Venaani, leader of the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), the largest opposition party in parliament, Bernadus Swartbooi of the Landless People’s Movement party, and Job Amupanda of the Affirmative Repositioning party and an associate professor.

Like other African countries, a raft of issues is expected to influence voter choices on Nov. 27, including unemployment, poverty, sluggish economic growth and inequality.

Liberation party era in Africa is ending

Liberation parties in Southern Africa, including South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) party, which had enjoyed a majority in parliament, governing the country for 30 years without a coalition, lost its majority in the May elections, forcing it to form a Government of National Unity, which consists of several political parties.

The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), which ruled the diamond-rich South African nation since independence in 1966, also lost in the Oct. 30 elections.

“The liberation party era is ending. This is happening as the historical memory on which many of such parties banked on holds less appeal to an increasingly young voter population,” Masuku said.

Mashimbye agreed that “as the liberation struggle memory recedes and with youths that were born after the colonial-apartheid era increasingly becoming politically active, at least in the form of being eligible to vote, invoking the heroic travails of liberation parties which they made during the oppression era has become a less effective election campaign strategy for most liberation parties on the continent.”

He said the focus of the current electorate seems to be more on present issues of governance, economic growth, crime and social progress, and they are less concerned with voting for political parties on the basis of their liberation struggle credentials.