Ushahidi used to expose fraud in Namibian elections

Namibia is still waiting for confirmation of its election results three days after voting completed. The country’s presidential and national assembly elections took place over Friday and Saturday 27–28 November 2009. And while the first ballots came in on Sunday, the final result will not be known until Wednesday. Fourteen political parties participated in the elections with the ruling party, South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) overwhelming favourite to win over its main challenger Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP). Meanwhile SWAPO’s Hifikepunye Pohamba is seeking a second five-year term as president. But social media is casting a long shadow over the election led by the African crowd-sourcing tool Ushahidi. (photo credit: Agence France Press)

The former rebel movement SWAPO has dominated Namibian politics since the nation’s independence from South Africa in 1990. They won a landslide in the last election five years ago but are expecting a closer result this time. The opposition RDP is a new party which broke away from SWAPO two years ago. The party headed by former foreign minister Hidipo Hamutenya is hoping that voters have had enough of SWAPO after a series of corruption scandals. These include the bribery of Chinese President's Hu Jintao's eldest son over a $56 million deal to supply scanners to Namibia's ports and airports.

However with early results suggest that SWAPO will be heading for a comfortable victory, opposition parties have begun suggesting the election was rigged. Four opposition parties including the RDP said the Namibian electoral commission had provided different figures for the number of people on the voters’ roll to each party. They also complained that their agents were barred from manning polling stations and supposedly indelible ink used to prevent double voting could be washed off. The four parties said in a joint statement their concerns “may compromise the outcome of the election.”

The National Society for Human Rights has also been highly critical of the electoral commission. The human rights watchdog claimed the voters' roll had a discrepancy of 180,000 voters including double-listed constituencies and voters as well as under-age people. The commission disagreed and revoked its status as an election observer on Wednesday deeming it “not impartial”. The Namibian High Court ruled to have the observer status reinstated barely hours after polls opened on Friday although the NSHR were still complaining of continued harassment as they tried to monitor the polls.

According to Global Voices Online, the NSHR were prominent among political parties and non-governmental organisations who used a number of social media tools to campaign, monitor and report on the elections. The NSHR used the African crowdsourcing tool Ushahidi to monitor the poll. Ushahidi was a tool created in the aftermath of disputed Kenya's elections in 2007 to collect and map eyewitness reports of violence. Ushahidi means testimony in Kiswahili (East Africa’s lingua franca) and as explained by Riyaad Minty to Sydney’s Media140 conference last month, the tool was also used by Al Jazeera to crowdsource crisis mapping during Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza.

In the Namibian election, the NSHR used Ushahidi to collect reports about incidents of fraud, undue influence, intimidation and violence. Eye-witnesses sent in their reports via SMS, email or by filling out a form on the website. At the time of writing there were 64 reports on the site. Examples include instances of presiding officers denying observers taking pictures of electoral fraud and a human rights activist was arrested for “insulting the former president”. While these reports are unverified, Ushahidi is showing itself to be a simple but formidable tool for the broadcasting of grass-roots activism in a continent with poor media coverage. It may yet prove to be a game-breaker in the torturous world of African politics.

The rules of the Namibian road

Namibia had a bad case of protocol blues overnight. The local Police force had to determine who had right of way when two VIP motorcades were on an apparent collision course. In the end, they ordered the motorcade of Namibia's current President Hifikepunye Pohamba to pull over in order to give way to his predecessor, Sam Nujoma. Pohamba's vehicles were forced to join a queue of other cars and wait as Namibia's founding president passed by. Police are blaming the clash on a surprise visit of Pohamba to the northern town of Oshakati. Both Pohamba and Nujoma are members of SWAPO, the South West African People's Organisation. SWAPO won 75.1% of about 977,400 registered voters in a population of 1.82 million and 55 out of 78 seats in the most recent election in 2004.

SWAPO had its base among the Ovambo people of northern Namibia. Sam Nujoma became the first President of SWAPO in 1960. In its previous incarnation Namibia was known South West Africa. It was a German colony until the end of World War I. South Africa then ruled it as a League of Nations mandate territory for the British until the end of World War II. After that war, South Africa repeatedly refused to turn the country into a UN trusteeship, or recognise that the UN had a legitimate interest in the region. By the 1960s, SWAPO emerged as the liberation organisation for the Namibian people co-opting groups from other parts of the country.

SWAPO launched a war of independence that lasted twenty years. They were a guerrilla group with Marxist leanings. In 1977 the Western members of the Security Council began negotiations aimed at bringing about the implementation of UN Resolution 435, providing for supervised elections. Progress was very slow, but in 1988, South Africa and Cuba agreed to withdraw their troops from Angola as an essential preparatory step before a Namibia settlement, which quickly followed.

SWAPO has been the dominant political party since independence. Sam Nujoma was quickly elected as Namibia's first President. Nujoma changed the constitution so he could run for a third term in 1999. Finally he stood aside in 2004 and was replaced as the SWAPO presidential candidate by his "hand-picked successor" Hifikepunye Pohamba. Those in Namibia hoping for a generation shift in the leadership were disappointed by this outcome. Nujoma, then 75, was barely six years older than Pohamba.


Hifikepunye Pohamba has been a member of SWAPO for 45 years. He spent much of his youth in African prisons. He was arrested in Namibia for political activity before fleeing to Rhodesia. There he was quickly deported. He then spent another four months in prison in Namibia before spending two years in Ovamboland under house arrest. After he left prison, he went to Luanda to set up Swapo's Angolan office

Angola was a refuge for SWAPO during the South African era. The organisation was headquartered in Angola’s capital Luanda and directed camps in the south from which its militants could infiltrate into Namibia in small units. In 1978, South African forces made their first raid into Angola, attacking SWAPO's main camp at Cassinga. The Lusaka Accord of 1984 provided for a cease-fire as well as South African withdrawal. SWAPO were relocated to monitored camps north of a neutral zone along the Namibian border. South Africa delayed their withdrawal until its own problems forced its troops to pull back.

Namibia has been a stable country since independence with steady economic growth. Traffic protocol notwithstanding, the country has mostly kept out of the news. That was until the phenomenon known as Brangelina arrived there in 2006. This was the year Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to have their baby there. They stayed at the Burning Shores lodge overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and enforced a no-fly zone over the resort and insisted that unwelcome journalists be banished from the country. The Namibian government claimed its decision to comply with the couple’s demands would put the country on the tourist map. Human rights activists in the country were outraged.

Their takeover has been described as ‘celebrity colonialism’. The area was sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. Pitt and Jolie reportedly wanted their first child to be born in Namibia because the country is ‘the cradle of human kind’ and it would be a ‘special’ experience. The real reason is more likely to be the exclusive privacy they were able to buy and therefore enhance the price of the photographs of their child. President Pohamba was more than willing to accommodate the arrangement and his wife was happy to pose with the famous family. All the Pohambas now need to do is win over Namibia’s traffic police.