‘They insulted our mothers’

At 15h00 on Wednesday, 27 November, the unthinkable happened at Okasheshete polling station in the Oshana region’s Okatyali constituency.

The station ran out of ballot papers.

At the time, presiding officer Saara Ruben says a sea of voters had shown up to cast their votes.

She says she and her team were subjected to insults as they informed voters standing in the scorching sun of the delay.
Many insults were deeply personal.

“They insulted our mothers. It felt as if we had swallowed the ballots ourselves when the voters turned on us,” Ruben recalls.

Some voters took the news more gracefully, she says.

“Some were very easy to convince that they should bear with us while we were getting another book. Some were uttering bad words towards us.”

Ruben says the polling station had only received 200 ballot papers – much less than the number of people who registered to vote in the area.

“We ran out of ballot papers at 15h00 that day, and we did not receive any until closing time, which was 21h00,” she says.

Another election worker, Leta Amweelo, who was stationed at Onawa Kindergarten polling station, also in the Oshana region, says some voters looked disappointed when election officials told them the ballot boxes were full.

“This was at around 01h00. We started compressing them to make space for more people to cast their votes. When we saw there was no space, we told them we were stopping the voting process,” she says.

“Joh! It was very bad. They could not understand it. We told them to be patient, but they they did not understant.”

Amweelo says the polling station did not have power, but one would-be voter then used his car to provide light.

“The tate got tired and started complaining about his battery, and switched off the light,” she says.

Amweelo says voters continued to complain about not being allowed to cast their votes.

“It was hell. A lot of people were asking questions. Eventually they left, but you could see it was with heavy hearts. We could see they really wanted to vote.”

Vilho Niilambi from Ehenye polling station says at his polling station they ran out of ballots and voters were angry and complaining after they were told they could not cast their votes.

“They were insulting us and alleged that we did not want them to vote,” he says.

Okasheshete, Onawa Kindergarten and Ehenye polling stations were among the 36 polling stations throughout the country that were reopened for the elections to continue on Friday and Saturday.

The Electoral Commission of Namibia has said the extension was necessary due to ballot paper shortages and verification machines malfunctioning.