Pohamba, Nguema sure of victory in Namibia, E' Guinea polls
NAMIBIA'S ruling party South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) yesterday looked set to hold onto power and the head of state appeared assured of a new five-year term as polls closed after two-day parliamentary and presidential elections.
Also, elections in Equatorial Guinea yesterday would undoubtedly extend the 30-year rule of Teodoro Obiang Nguema, a man accused of draining his nation's oil wealth to fabulously enrich family and cronies while his people suffer in slums.
Western governments that have promised to fight corruption so far have done little as companies compete for concessions for petroleum and a burgeoning natural gas industry
The Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) said it might take until Wednesday to count all the ballots from the 1.18 million registered voters scattered across the diamond-producing country that is home to 10 per cent of the world's uranium output.
President Hifikepunye Pohamba and SWAPO have faced a strong challenge from the opposition Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP), which emerged as a breakaway faction of SWAPO in 2007.
The RDP is expected to become the new official opposition in the largely desert country and could threaten SWAPO's two-thirds majority in parliament.
A two-third majority enables the ruling party to alter the constitution, which founding president Sam Nujoma did to extend the number of terms he could seek. Pohamba succeeded Nujoma in 2007.
Counting at the more than 3,000 polling stations began as soon as polls closed at 1900 GMT...but it may take until Wednesday to know the total numbers," ECN Deputy Director of Operations Theo Mujoro told Reuters.
The RDP has tackled some traditional SWAPO strongholds and analysts say the strength of its challenge could make for more accountable and transparent government.
Obiang, 67, denies all charges and his government said in a statement released by an expensive U.S. lobbying firm that Equatorial Guinea "is committed to holding fair and democratic elections. As part of our reform efforts we aim to ensure all voices are heard."
Opposition parties though complain the playing field is far from even: Campaigners have been attacked and harassed, Obiang gave only six weeks' notice for the election and coverage in the state-controlled media is skewed.
The National Electoral Commission is also headed by the interior minister and weighted with Obiang supporters, and the government has refused to publish the voters' roll.
Some 290,000 voters are registered and Obiang has boasted at rallies that he will win with more than the 97.1 per cent garnered in a 2002 polls widely criticised as fraudulent. Then, he ran unchallenged as opposition leaders pulled out citing harassment and rigging. This year four men are challenging Obiang, though none doubt who will win.
"People will vote for Obiang so that they can survive, so that they can keep their jobs," said John E. Bennett, a retired diplomat who was U.S. ambassador there from 1991, left briefly after receiving government-sponsored death threats in 1993 and ended his term in 1994. The government also accused Bennett of dancing on graves in a black magic ritual.
Through government jobs and private companies from hotels to Internet service providers, Obiang and his clique control everything in the small country, Bennett said.
"Obiang has such an extraordinarily tight control that there is no oxygen for civil society to develop independent thought," Bennett said.
He said that is why an estimated quarter of the population - including writers, historians and artists - live in nearby Gabon, Cameroun or Nigeria, or in Spain, the former coloniser. About 600,000 people live in the country.
Bennett said Obiang flies in a $50 million Boeing jet while those needing to get from Malabo, the capital on an island, to Bata, the biggest town on the African mainland, are crammed into a secondhand Russian turboprop that cost $200,000.
"The national airline sells the seats, then they sell floor space, and people have to sprawl on top of piles of baggage," he said.
The country's average annual income per capita has swollen to some $37,000, making the World Bank classify it as a developed nation. But according to UN figures, 60 per cent of people try to live on less than $1 a day.
Obiang has called such statistics "false," and strongly denies any corruption.
A U.S. Senate investigation in 2004 found $700 million stashed away at Riggs Bank in Washington, all held in accounts in the name of Obiang, his family and clan. Some of the money was carried to the bank, a million dollars at a time, in shrink-wrapped bundles, bankers told the Senate. Riggs was fined $41 million and subsequently collapsed.
Despite all that, the human rights group Global Witness last week published documents of an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicating U.S. banks since have accepted some $75 million in wire transfers between 2005 and 2007 from Obiang's favorite son and would-be successor, Teodorin Obiang.
Two of the banks filed suspicious activity reports but still went ahead and accepted the loot.
