Lahja Nashuuta
This year’s presidential election will not feature independent presidential candidates.
This is after the four individuals who wanted to gun for the highest office in the land solo failed to meet all requirements as prescribed by the Electoral Act.
“They made it almost impossible for us to meet what was the legal requirement, which was to obtain signatures,” were the words of Ally Angula, one of the presidential hopefuls, after the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) rejected her application.
Angula, together with Frans Koolike, Jeremia Kaambo, and Elsie Chen, attempted to register as independent candidates for the upcoming Presidential and National Assembly elections slated for 27 November.
However, neither could make it to the presidential race after failing to secure and capture 7 000 electorate signatures as required.
Angula and Koolike blamed their failure to the ECN for what they termed “ECN gratuitous registration requirements.”
“The biggest challenge has been this new system that ECN has introduced. Because ECN requires that when they open on the 26 September, as an independent candidate, you must submit every name individually on the system,” Angula said.
She further said, “Now when we work out how long it takes to submit 7 000 names on a system that requires you to have all the details of a person, but the voter’s card has got abbreviated second and third names. And the system of ECN does not take the details that are on the card that were generated from that same system.”
“They moved the obligation onto us to say you must obtain and capture. Therefore, we’ve now been dedicated to a process that was so unnecessary. Very unnecessary,” Angula continued.
Angula, who maintained that she managed to gather the signatures said they were only given 13 days to complete the capturing of the signature, a process that she strongly believed could take 35 days.
“We’ve worked out to capture 7 000 names on this new system of ECN. That does not take the details that are on the voter’s card but takes the details that are in the background of the system. It would take 35 days if you worked from 8h00 to 2h00 in the morning,” she said.
Angula, a chartered accountant by profession, claimed that she was the first independent candidate who was going through the process of submitting on the system.
“They were learning the bugs of the system as we were submitting. However, I’m grateful to the ECN helpdesk. They’ve really helped us wherever we’ve got a challenge. It’s a very slow process. I don’t believe that there’s anything I think we had done the most, where we had captured up to 7 000 on the system, that we defaulted to giving them the physical forms rather,” she said.
On his part, Koolike said, “They created havoc for us because they gave us a task that was not ours. Now for independent candidates who are not being funded, you now need to deploy resources to catch up if you’ve got 13 days, something that you should have done for 35 days. You must hire people.”
He also blamed ECN for not having a framework for applying, especially for the independent candidate.
“First, we were told we needed to gather and capture 7 000 signatures, but now they are saying we can only submit 3500 signatures at once with a payment, but that’s not how it’s supposed to be.
They are supposed to have an open space or open window for applying, so you submit based on that process of an open window for applying until you complete the application process,” he argued.
Now that he will not feature on the ballot, Koolike threw his support behind the Affirmative Repositioning and its presidential candidate, Job Amupanda.
“We offer our solidarity and support to the leader of the Affirmative Repositioning Party on the basis of a generational mission in the fight for social justice and social development,” Koolike announced.