On December 3rd the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) announced that Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah of the ruling South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) party has emerged victorious in the disputed November 27-30 presidential election.
It said Nandi-Ndaitwah won 57 percent of the vote, clearly beating her main rival Panduleni Itula of the Independent Patriots for Change (IPC) party, who received around 26 percent. As a result, Nandi-Ndaitwah, a former freedom fighter and current vice president, is now poised to make history as Namibia’s first female leader.
Meanwhile, however, her party SWAPO disappointed in the parliamentary elections, narrowly maintaining its majority with 51 of the 96 available seats. In comparison, the party secured 63 seats and a comfortable majority in the 2019 election.
Although SWAPO, the former liberation movement that has ruled Namibia since independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, is clinging to the presidency, it is clearly losing electoral appeal. The party achieved its best ever result in the 2014 election with 80 percent of the vote and a 77-seat supermajority, but has been on a downward trend since then.
There are many reasons why Namibians appear to be slowly moving away from the movement that secured their liberation.
Thirty-four years after independence, SWAPO is struggling to tackle multidimensional poverty rates of 43 percent, tackle high unemployment and provide vital services such as water and sanitation to long-marginalized communities. While the World Bank classifies Namibia as an upper-middle income country, it also describes it as the second most unequal country in the world Gini index.
Over the years, Namibia has built a dual economy that has had a negative impact on the socio-economic expectations of the poor and unemployed: an economic structure that features a highly developed modern sector alongside an informal sector that relies primarily on subsistence.
This coupled with an obvious increase in corruption at the government level – which was clearly evident in the $650 million Fishrot scandal The involvement of high-ranking SWAPO figures has incited many Namibians, especially poor young people who are most affected by high unemployment and a lack of upward mobility, against the ruling party.
SWAPO, once viewed by many in Namibia as invincible and synonymous with the Namibian state, is now in rapid, perhaps irreversible decline.
And in the southern African region, Namibia’s liberation movement-turned-political party is not alone in this predicament.
In fact, a liberation movement in the region has already been pushed out of power.
In the October 30 election, Botswana’s citizens sent the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) – the former liberation movement that had ruled the country since independence in September 1966 – to the opposition benches. After 58 continuous years in power, the party managed to win just four seats in this year’s election.
The BDP’s defeat was due to years of weak economic growth and an unemployment rate of 26.7 percent, which turned the population against the government. Mounting corruption allegations against the BDP’s Mokgweetsi Masisi, who served as Botswana’s fifth president from 2018 to 2024, did not improve 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 this year’s parliamentary elections in May, the vote share of the Liberation Movement, which became the ruling party, fell to just over 40 percent, a sharp decline from the 57 percent it achieved in 2019. Twenty years ago, in 2004, the party had the support of a whopping 69.9 percent of South African voters.
As with the BDP in Botswana, the ANC’s gradual decline is linked to its inability to tackle unemployment, deficiencies in service delivery and allegations of corruption against its senior members. In the 2010s, corruption involving senior ANC leaders damaged the party’s longstanding credibility and crippled state-owned enterprises, resulting in losses of about $100 billion – equivalent to a third of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Over the years, millions of voters have distanced themselves from the ANC due to the party’s repeated failures to ensure ethical governance and address the complex and evolving socio-economic challenges of contemporary South African society.
In other countries in the region, long-standing former liberation movements are suffering similar failures, leading them to resort to oppressive and undemocratic methods to retain their power.
Let’s take the case of Mozambique.
On October 24, Mozambique’s electoral commission declared Daniel Chapo and his ruling party, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo), winners of the October 9 parliamentary elections. Yet the electoral process was fundamentally flawed and marked by political assassinations, widespread irregularities, and punitive restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and assembly.
Frelimo has been in power in Mozambique since the country gained independence from Portugal in June 1975 after a ten-year war of freedom. However, she failed to live up to expectations and maintain the support of the people of Mozambique after ruling the independent state.
Today only 40 percent of the population has access to the electricity grid. Between 2014/15 and 2019/20, the national poverty rate increased from 48.4 percent to 62.8 percent, with at least 95 percent of rural households falling into multidimensional poverty. Making matters worse, more than 80 percent of the workforce works in the informal sector, leaving millions of Mozambicans without access to social protection.
Corruption is also widespread among top Frelimo members. In 2022, 11 senior government officials, including Armando Ndambi Guebuza, the son of former President Armando Guebuza, were found guilty of crimes related to a $2 billion “hidden debt” scandal that resulted in the loss of government-guaranteed hundreds Millions of dollars led to loans and triggered an economic collapse in the country.
Therefore, Frelimo does not seem to expect to win the majorities it has become accustomed to over the years in free and fair elections. Therefore, it continually tries to cover up its governance shortcomings through political violence and attacks on the electoral process.
In Tanzania, the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party secured an incredible 98 percent of seats in local elections on November 27th. However, this electoral process was also marked by arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture, restrictions on freedom of expression and extrajudicial killings, including the killings Ali Mohamed Kibaoa member of the opposition party Chadema.
In Zimbabwe, too, the ruling ZANU-PF, another former liberation movement, has founded a heavily securitized state to maintain its fragile position of power. Since the nation became independent in April 1980, ZANU-PF has consistently suppressed opposition voices and conducted a series of fraudulent elections, such as the chaotic harmonized elections in August 2023, largely to avoid responsibility for its overwhelming incompetence.
Meanwhile, in Angola, the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) made major efforts to silence dissent and ensure its success in the August 2022 elections. Through these efforts, the MPLA managed to extend its decades-long tenure GovernanceThis was achieved by the narrowest margin ever, suggesting that a huge political shift may be on the way.
Times have certainly changed, and it is clear that southern Africa’s former freedom fighters are falling short of the noble ideals of freedom they envisioned in the colonial era.
A state of freedom that restricts the full exercise of core civil rights and disregards the right to life is a superficial achievement.
Liberation that does not provide equal and sufficient access to basic services, employment opportunities and economic empowerment is as degrading as the old reality of colonial subjugation.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
