Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes once said “Forewarned is forearmed”. 

This phrase means prior knowledge of possible dangers, problems or situations gives one a tactical advantage to deal with it when you need to. 

A danger foreseen is half avoided.  Those who know that something is coming are better prepared to face it than those who do not know.

Following the commotion at the special voting day on 13 November 2024 at the Van Rhyn Primary School, conducted by the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) for the Presidential and National Assembly elections, many comments were made by all and sundry. 

That special election day was meant to allow about 8 000 essential service workers and Namibians abroad, who could not vote in their districts on the election day due to essential work commitments, to vote.

Shortly thereafter, on 11 November, I titled my article in the New Era newspaper ‘ECN should conduct a blameless incident postmortem’.

 The article intended to alert the ECN that by not holding blameless incident postmortems, we would be “skating on thin ice”, literally meaning that we would be in danger. The central theme was to urge the ECN to conduct a blame-free analysis and discussions as soon as possible on what transpired at the Van Rhyn Primary School and elsewhere during the special voting day. 

This would have been to produce a detailed description of exactly what went wrong to have caused the incident(s) and all concomitant shortcomings, along with a list of steps to be taken to prevent a similar incident from occurring again on 27 November.

 Thus, the postmortem process is meant to drive focus, instil a culture of learning, and identify opportunities for improvement that otherwise would be lost.

Importantly, an analysis of how the incident response process worked was expected to be an integral part of the discussion to help institutionalise a culture of continuous improvement in the organisation. 

I stated in my article that delaying the postmortem could postpone key learnings that may prevent such incidents from recurring, as “the stakes are too high to overlook such a critical process” during the said elections on 27 November. 

This plea might have fallen on deaf ears.

Challenges 

On 27 November, as elections were unfolding, voters were deprived of the opportunity to vote in a watershed national election. 

The opposition political parties are now describing the recently concluded national elections as a sham, further demanding it to be declared invalid. Reportedly, the elections were marred by several challenges, including a shortage of ballot papers, long queues, poor communication from the ECN, malfunctioning or technical glitches with voter verification tablets, and other logistical failures.

ECN is being accused of inane incompetence, gross negligence and deliberate voter suppression. 

Other complaints are that mobile voting stations abandoned communities before all eligible voters could cast their ballots. 

Also, as a result of shortages of ballot papers at some polling stations, voters casually walked away. However, voters were still voting early Thursday, hours after the polls were scheduled to close. 

Eventually, voters returned to the polls on Friday and Saturday, two days after the first ballots were cast in the elections, after the ECN had extended the voting dates from 29 and 30 November to only 36 polling stations in eight constituencies out of 121 constituencies.

Benefits 

Conducting an effective postmortem allows one to learn quickly from your mistakes, and to immediately improve your systems and processes. 

A well-designed, blameless postmortem serves to iteratively improve your infrastructure and incident response process. 

The value of effective, blameless postmortems is that they create a healthy culture amongst team members, redress errors and shortcomings, decrease chances of ignoring incidents for fear of blame, create an open and continuously improving culture of learning, increase support and communication, and free teams to do their best work accordingly.

Admittedly, failure is inevitable in any leadership role, but how one handles it can make a big difference in one’s personal or professional growth as well as in the development of an organisation. 

Recovering from failure requires resilience, adaptability and a positive mindset. 

Hence, the first step to recovering from failure is to acknowledge it, take responsibility for it, take immediate remedial steps, and move forward.

Denying failures, and blaming the system and others for your failure will only prevent you from learning and institutionalising the culture of iterative improvement that needs to be undertaken effectively in an organisation. 

Instead, one should reflect on what went wrong, what you could have done differently and what you can do better next time. Notably, if there is still sufficient time, the process of correcting or rectifying mistakes must be done speedily for it to have no bearing on the sequence of events.

 Operations management keeps processes running smoothly within the organisation. But conducting a blameless incident postmortem – to take stock of what transpired (especially on the special voting day, 13th November) – should have been the only viable option in finding a solution to the drawbacks and causes of the fiasco.

This important exercise should have never been abandoned or pushed aside. 

It would have pinpointed the ECN’s shortcomings in planning and preparation. 

For ECN, it is important to look at recent failures as valuable lessons that their leadership and team members can learn from for future projects. At no point does anyone get into a project hoping to fail, but when certain decisions do not go according to plan, as a leader, one has to stand up and take responsibility for it.

Arguably, if the suggested blame-free incident postmortem could have been undertaken timeously, some of these problems and threats to our democracy we are facing today due to the recent conduct of the elections could have been somewhat adequately addressed or avoided.

Moreover, the reputation of Namibia and the integrity of the ECN would be protected.

*Maj. Gen. (Rtd) J. B. Tjivikua: Criminal intelligence analyst.