Tearing Down the Walls in Namibia

While all eyes were on the celebrations surrounding the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, another 20th anniversary was almost completely eclipsed in the news last week.

In Africa’s last colony, Namibia, the first free and fair elections were held on November 7th, 1989, two days before the Wall dividing East and West Berlin came down.

Namibia, a former German colony, was the last colony on the African continent to achieve independence and it was high time that the shadow of that era should pass away. The historical ties and destinies of Germany and the far south-western corner of Africa were bound together one more time in November 1989.

And on November 27-28, 2009, Namibian citizens will have the opportunity to freely elect their President and Members of Parliament.  Yet walls surrounding elections now  take the shape of media coverage.

In order to promote free and fair elections, and break down these new walls in Namibia, The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in Namibia launched ElectionWatch.org. As part of its Election Watch project, the IPPR is monitoring the coverage of the impending election on NBC television news and One Africa television news from October 30 to November 26 2009 – the day before polling takes place on November 27 and 28.

The Namibian election guidelines state that there must be “equal opportunity for all political parties to access the state media”. However despite pulling the plug on free airtime for political parties, the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) is still giving SWAPO red-carpet treatment. The South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) is a political party and former liberation movement in Namibia. It has been the governing party in Namibia since independence in 1990.

For the week of October 30 to November 5, a whopping 82 per cent of the national broadcaster’s political news coverage was devoted to SWAPO rallies, while the next highest party coverage was a mere 4 per cent. The IPPR also found that during the same period, the opposition parties did not get any television coverage from the NBC. If this pattern continues, NBC could be in violation of the South African Democratic Community guidelines for democratic elections.

Election Watch was designed to:

• Provide a vehicle for voter education
• Provide briefing information for civil society activists, journalists, students, and voters in general
• Provide a platform for civil society’s and citizens’ views of the electoral process
• Provide ‘early warnings’ of possible problems in the electoral process
• Point out positive examples and experiences within the democratic process
• Promote Namibian, African and international benchmarks on elections and democracy

Twenty years ago, as the population in Berlin took sledgehammers to the hated barrier, in the Namibian capital Windhoek, the voters lined up outside polling stations on one of the city’s main thoroughfares - Kaiserstrasse. Since then, Kaiserstrasse has - for perfectly understandable reasons - been given a new name, Independence Avenue. Let’s hope it can keep that name true to its meaning.