By Catherine Sasman
WINDHOEK
Main opposition party Congress of Democrats (CoD) leader, Tsudao Gurirab, yesterday said the irregularities pointed out by an independent audit of the electoral procedures of the party at an extraordinary congress in May “do not accuse the so-called Ulenga group of a single wrongdoing”.
With party president, Ben Ulenga, in the Congo, Gurirab responded to interpretations of the audit by a factious group in the party calling themselves the “CoD majority” and “genuine CoD” led by Ignatius Shixwameni and Kala Gertze.
The “CoD majority” on Monday called for Ulenga to resign, following irregularities found in the electoral process.
Calling the group “rebels”, Gurirab urged CoD members to “go back to the task of party building”.
“It is now also clear that the initial petulance of the rebels was conceived in dishonesty, lies and self-serving egos, for the report does not support any of their flimsy reasons for absconding from the congress nor their subsequent lies,” said Gurirab.
The audit panel consisted of Clement Daniels, Toni Hancox, Samson Ndeikwila and Ian Swartz.
The panel found two incidents of fraud involving the wrongful registration of delegates.
Aune Tjirare from Khomas Region was registered but never attended the congress. Ferdinand /Gereseb from Windhoek was not nominated to represent his region, but attended the congress irrespective, registered and voted under the name Matheus Katjikuru.
“In light of the irregularities that we have exposed, we conclude that there was fraud and cheating, which compromised the integrity of the process,” the panel said.
The panel further said that “two cases are two too many for a party that is founded on the principles of democracy to tolerate”.
“Our response is that indeed we too set ourselves, as a party, high standards.
We would therefore have liked to see a 100 percent perfect conduct of elections. We will still follow up to establish how these two incidences happened,” said Gurirab.
“They [the ‘Ulenga group’] say they are not guilty but someone must have caused the irregularities,” said Kala Gertze of the “CoD majority” group. “And they make statements in the name of the leadership of the party, but the organisation is leaderless.”
The panel said the exact number of “true delegates” could not be ascertained from lists provided by both the ‘Ulenga group’ and the ‘CoD majority’.
The Keetmanshoop extraordinary congress was called presumably because the party had become “dysfunctional” and the leadership had to “seek a new mandate” from its members.
Contention arose when five delegates of the northern regions – Omusati, Oshana, Ohangwena and Oshikoto North – were not happy with a decision on representation and hence abstained from voting.
More unhappiness ensued when four northern delegates arrived for the congress but found that they were not registered, and allegations were made that they were ‘school children’.
This ruckus subsequently led to a number of delegates leaving the congress before it was concluded.
According to the forming factions in the party, one group contended that a decision was made to have all delegates re-registered. Another group claimed that only accredited delegates were required to re-register.
Basing its conclusion on “hard evidence”, the panel concluded that the decision on the selection of delegates was not “strictly speaking” in line with the CoD constitution.