The Electoral Commission of Namibia has delayed announcing results from Friday’s presidential and parliamentary elections.
The results were supposed to be declared Saturday or Sunday, but Theo Mujoro, director of operations for the Electoral Commission of Namibia, said the commission found mathematical errors in the results from some constituencies.
Saturday’s early results show the presidential candidate of the ruling SWAPO party leading with 77 percent of the vote with about 10 percent of 121 constituencies counted.
Mujoro said the commission will double check the results from those constituencies in question.
“We had planned to officially announce the national consolidated tally today (Sunday). Unfortunately, due to some verification processes that are currently going, we have decided to delay the official announcement of results until tomorrow,” he said.
Mujoro said the commission wants to make sure that when it announces the results the public will have confidence in them.
“The problem primarily is that, from the returns that we received from some of the constituencies, we have detected some mathematical errors and what we have been doing is that we are contacting the returning officers so that they may provide us with the sole document for us to be able to ascertain for ourselves and to effect the necessary corrections,” Mujoro said.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Sunday congratulated the people of Namibia for exercising their democratic right to vote.
"Namibia has once again demonstrated its commitment to an open electoral process and respect for presidential term limits," Kerry said.
The African Union (AU) election observer mission to Namibia on Sunday said the political environment leading to Friday’s election was "generally peaceful and calm."
The AU, however, expressed concern about unregulated flow of money during elections and how that can “disadvantage small political parties with limited access to particular sources of funding, as well as the possible subversion of the will of voters’ campaign money.”
Mujoro said the government does not finance the campaigns of political parties, although parties represented in parliament receive money from the government which is distributed on a proportional basis.
“The parties that are represented in the National Assembly receive money from government, and this money is distributed to political parties on a proportional basis. In other words, the more seats you have in the national assembly, you get a bigger piece of this cake,” Mujoro said.
He added that once the money is given, it is up to individual political parties to decide how they wish to use it.
There are reports that during the campaign some business people donated buses to the ruling SWAP party, but not to smaller parties.
Mujoro said there is no law in Namibia that prohibits private individuals from financing specific political party campaign activities.
“Anybody, any citizen can make a contribution to the campaign activity of a particular political party. However, if such monetary contributions are received from outside the border of the country, there is a law that requires the receiving political party to be able to declare that,” he said.
