Southern Times - 'The Relevance of Namibia's Democratic Elections in 2009

Former popular struggle movements also govern other member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Angola and Zimbabwe - the MPLA in Luanda and ZANU-PF in Harare respectively.

Namibia finds herself in the middle of parliamentary and presidential elections and the ruling SWAPO Party seems on the winning trail again- since October 1989, when it won the first democratic elections.

SWAPO seems set to win these parliamentary and presidential elections with a defined majority.

One of the most defining reasons for success of these ruling political parties is Africa’s long, brutal, exploitative race-based colonial history.

The aforementioned war had cost hundreds of thousands of African lives. Never had Africa been exposed to such brutalities and torture, dehumanization, abuse, abject poverty, starvation and reckless wars. The colonial-apartheid-racist South Africa took African land with brutal force until 1990.

Born in the third generation in Swakopmund, Namibia, Africa, of German colonial settler background well after World War 2, I have seen many international Western productions, read many of the books and other publications, even visited a Holocaust museum. To this day in 2009 I have been aware of the gruesome murder of six million Jews in Germany until shortly before the end of World War 2. This columnist took great strain and was seriously horrified and remains such.

But, as far as Africa and the mass-killings of Africans are concerned, the referral to a Holocaust thunders in its absence. The foreign-owned and controlled media simply ignores the millions of deaths of African people since World War 2. Are Africans lesser people, I ask from a Caucasian colonial-settler background? Is this Christian?

In the above context, SWAPO Party will certainly win these elections too, like their brothers- and sisters-in-arms in the rest of Africa. It is observed that no other political party can deliver the caliber of Namibia’s SWAPO Party; South Africa’s ANC; Angola’s MPLA; Mozambique’s FRELIMO and Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF.

To assume otherwise, repeatedly attempting to discredit this history through abuse of power; abuse of the law and the judiciary; character assassination; continuous media propaganda; trying to unsettle those political movements and parties through a “foreign civil society”, covert and third force operations, attempting to render them corrupt and toothless old dogs, is in real terms not only an exercise of futility, but an insult to African structures.

South Africa’s democratically elected President Jacob Zuma and the ruling ANC had to endure an eight-year long concerted onslaught of vicious daily media propaganda and strategised media disinformation campaigns to character assassinate Jacob Zuma and some of his supporters. This was purgery at its worst.

It backfired, as was first demonstrated at the ANC Congress in Polokwane, Limpopo Province, in northern South Africa.

Mbeki and his cohorts were disgraced and left embarrassed. Zuma and the real ANC form the government of South Africa today.

To now publicly claim that all former struggle movements in the SADC region that form today’s ruling parties and governments have won elections in their respective countries, because they had “moved ballot boxes to exchange genuine ballot boxes with fake ones” (as expressed by Hidipo Hamutenya), creates the perception that those utterances were made by an individual who “either whithers in despair, or is downright mischievously immature, or both”.

That unfortunate statement was described as “coming from a confused and troubled mind of an individual, definitely not from Africa”. A senior member from ZANU-PF in Harare, Zimbabwe, stated, “the least said about that unsubstantiated and corrupt opinionof an individual, the better”.

All former struggle movements who form today’s governments in the SADC member states seemed to agree with the rebuke from government in Windhoek, which responded, “The leader of the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP), Hidipo Hamutenya is instigating instability and uproar in the SADC region by accusing all ruling parties in the region of cheating during elections.”

A profound reason for not being accepted and respected, certainly not by African heads-of-state of most AU members with the exception of a few, is the serious discomfort most African leaders feel with same old exclusively imperialist-corporate-colonial interests backing the above-mentioned political groupings. Those are not Africa’s interests.