On December 3, the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) announced that Netumbo Nnamdi Ndituwa of the ruling South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) had won the contested presidential election held from November 27 to 30. announced.
According to the newspaper, Nnamdi Ndituwa received 57% of the vote, comfortably defeating his main rival, Panduleni Itura of the Independent Patriotic Party (IPC), who received around 26%. That’s why former freedom fighter and current vice president Nnamdi Ndutowa is now trying to make history as Namibia’s first female leader.
Meanwhile, her party SWAPO disappointed in parliamentary elections, winning 51 of 96 seats and barely maintaining a majority. In contrast, the party secured a comfortable majority with 63 seats in the 2019 election.
SWAPO, the former liberation movement that has ruled Namibia since it gained independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, is clearly losing its electoral appeal despite retaining the presidency. . The party achieved its best ever result in the 2014 election, securing 80% of the vote and a supermajority of 77 seats, but has been in decline since then.
There are many reasons why Namibians appear to be gradually moving away from the movement that secured their liberation.
Thirty-four years after independence, SWAPO is struggling to tackle multidimensional poverty rates of 43%, address high unemployment rates, and provide essential services such as water and sanitation to long-marginalized communities. Masu. While the World Bank classifies Namibia as an upper middle-income country, it also ranks it as the second most unequal country in the world according to the Gini index.
Namibia has long established a dual economy that negatively impacts the socio-economic aspirations of the poor and unemployed. This economic structure is characterized by a highly developed modern sector, alongside an informal sector that is primarily focused on subsistence.
This, coupled with an apparent increase in corruption at the government level (as revealed in the $650 million Fishlot scandal involving SWAPO executives), has left many Namibians, especially poor young people, facing high unemployment rates and Most affected by lack of upward mobility. , against the ruling party.
SWAPO, once seen by many in Namibia as undefeated in elections and synonymous with the Namibian nation, is now in rapid, perhaps irreversible decline.
And in Southern Africa, Namibia’s liberation movement-turned-political party is not alone in this predicament.
In fact, one of the region’s liberation movements has already been ousted from power.
In the October 30 election, Botswana’s people entrusted opposition MPs with the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), the former liberation movement that has ruled the country since achieving independence in September 1966. The party has been in power uninterrupted for 58 years, but won only four seats in this year’s elections.
The BDP’s defeat came against a backdrop of years of weak economic growth and a 26.7 percent unemployment rate, which turned the population against the government. Rising corruption allegations against BDP’s Mokgweetsi Masisi, who served as Botswana’s fifth president from 2018 to 2024, also did not help the party’s electoral chances.
Meanwhile, in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of white minority rule in April 1994. In the general election held in May of this year, the liberation movement took a turn for the worse, and the ruling party’s vote share fell to number one. His approval rating was just over 40%, a significant drop from the 57% he received in 2019. Twenty years ago, in 2004, the party had a whopping 69.9% support. South African voters.
Like the BDP in Botswana, the ANC’s gradual loss of support has been linked to its inability to address unemployment, deficiencies in service delivery, and corruption charges against senior members. Throughout the 2010s, corruption involving senior ANC leaders undermined the party’s longstanding credibility, crippled state-owned enterprises, and led to losses of around $100 billion, equivalent to a third of gross domestic product (GDP). occurred.
Millions of voters have distanced themselves from the ANC over the years because of its repeated failures to ensure ethical governance and address the complex and evolving socio-economic challenges of contemporary South African society.
Similar failures have plagued long-ruling former liberation movements in other countries in the region, forcing them to turn to repressive and undemocratic methods to maintain their grip on power. .
Consider the case of Mozambique.
On October 24, Mozambique’s electoral commission declared Daniel Chapo and his ruling Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo) the winner of the October 9 general election. Nevertheless, the electoral process was fundamentally flawed and marked by political killings, widespread fraud, and punitive restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and assembly.
Frelimo has been in power in Mozambique since gaining independence from Portugal in June 1975 after a 10-year freedom war. However, even after governing the independent country, he was unable to meet the expectations of the Mozambican people and maintain their support.
Currently, only 40% of the population has access to grid electricity. From 2014/15 to 2019/20, the national poverty rate rose from 48.4 percent to 62.8 percent, with at least 95 percent of rural households living in multidimensional poverty. Further complicating the problem, more than 80 percent of the workforce works in the informal sector, leaving millions of Mozambicans without social protection in their daily lives. That’s true.
Corruption is widespread even among Frelimo’s top members. In 2022, 11 government officials, including former President Armando Guebuza’s son Armando Ndambi Guebuza, were found guilty of charges related to a $2 billion “hidden debt” scandal that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses in government guarantees. received the verdict. Expanded lending and caused economic collapse in the country.
As a result, Frelimo does not seem to expect to win a majority in the free and fair elections to which it has long been accustomed. Therefore, there is a continuous attempt to cover up failures in governance through political violence and attacks on the electoral process.
In Tanzania, the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) secured an astonishing 98% of seats in local opinion polls held on November 27. Nevertheless, this electoral process was also marked by arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture, restrictions on freedom of expression, and extrajudicial killings, including the assassination of opposition Chadema party member Ali Mohamed Kibao. .
In Zimbabwe, another former liberation movement, the ruling party ZANU-PF, has established a highly securitized state to maintain its fragile grip on power. Since the country gained independence in April 1980, ZANU-PF has always suppressed opposition voices, mainly to avoid responsibility for its overwhelming incompetence, leading to political challenges such as the disastrous harmonized elections in August 2023. carried out a series of fraudulent elections.
Meanwhile, in Angola, the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) has made every effort to silence the opposition and ensure success in the August 2022 elections. Through these efforts, the MPLA succeeded in extending its decades-long rule, but its narrowest victory to date suggests that dramatic political change may be imminent. are.
Times have certainly changed, and it is clear that southern Africa’s former freedom fighters have fallen short of the lofty ideals of freedom they envisioned during colonial times.
A free state that restricts the full expression of citizens’ core rights and ignores the right to life reflects shallow attainment.
Emancipation that does not provide fair and adequate access to basic services, employment opportunities, and economic empowerment is as humiliating as the old realities of colonial conquest.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
