How Democratic Is Namibia's Democracy?
Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 13, No. 1: 155-173 How Democratic Is Namibia’s Democracy? An Anatomy of SWAPO’s Political Hegemony Henning Melber Abstract This essay analyzes Namibia’s political culture since independence and assesses the dominance by the former anticolonial liberation movement, the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), as a party. SWAPO is in sole control over the government and has expanded its dominance in parliament from an absolute majority at independence to 80 percent in six subsequent elections. The essay explores the origins, character, and nature of this political dominance, which increasingly turned into hegemony, and suggests the concept of democratic authoritarianism as a potential category to come to terms with the existing de facto one-party system in Namibia. Keywords: Democracy, democratic authoritarianism, elections, Namibia, SWAPO. SWAPO Party will grow from strength to strength and continues to rule Namibia for the next ONE THOUSAND YEARS. -Sam Nujoma, former President of Namibia1 Namibia is widely considered a positive example of decolonization, understood as a successful process of controlled change during the last stages of the transfer of political power. The political system’s transition from a minority settler administration, which had been controlled remotely from Pretoria, to a democratically elected Constituent Assembly under United Nations Henning Melber is a Senior Research Fellow at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden; Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria and the Centre for Africa Studies, University of the Free State in Bloemfontein; and Research Associate at the Transformation Research Unit (TRU): Democracy Giobally, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
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