Democracy: Electing woman president has put Namibia far ahead of US

In a July 2015 speech to Kenyans at the Kasarani Indoor Arena, former US President Barack Obama equated society’s alienation of women from development-oriented endeavours to going into a game of football without half the team.

Recently, just when the world was still coming to terms with Donald Trump’s shock victory in the 2024 US presidential election, and his now-awaited return to the White House, Namibia elected her first female president.

It was the second time in under 10 years that voters—including members of the United States Electoral College, that coterie of fewer than 600 souls that has decided who wins US presidency since 1787—had cast their ballots to deny a woman the chance to govern “the land of opportunity”! 

What’s even more ironical and jocular about it all is the fact that Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, 72, of the long-ruling South West Africa People’s Organisation party was declared the winner—with 57 per cent of the vote—in Namibia only 34 years since gaining independence from Apartheid-era South Africa while the United States, the most recognisable face of the pantheon of the First World, and a long-time exponent of global democratisation with nearly 250 years of independence, still baulked at the idea and prospects of a woman at the top of its federal governmental leadership. 

The election in Namibia wasn’t perfect, with the main opposition candidate Panduleni Itula, 67, of the Independent Patriots of Change party alleging massive irregularities, and the Electoral Commission of Namibia chairperson Elsie Nghikembua admitting to failures, including a shortage of ballot papers, the overheating of the electronic tablets and delays at the ballot box.

In the recent US presidential election, though, problems were less managerial and more attitudinal in nature, dominating the build-up and ultimately impacting the polls’ decisional culmination.

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While issues such as the performance of the US economy under President Joe Biden formed an important consideration for the average voter, candidates and their supporters, for the better part of the campaign period, generally descended to minor passions and such visceral, emotional prisms as ageism, racism, sexism, misogyny and racial de-integration.

The scions and descendants of the US’ long and storied heritage of immigration—White America, in particular—turned into vocal opponents of the very idea that lubricated their own becoming, and that guarantees their continued claim to being, Americans.

As a historian, Trumposceptic and an angsty watcher of the regrettable rise of moral, perceptional, visionary, behavioural, policy and decisional Trumpism in North America and Western Europe, I hold the view that if, indeed, it is unAmerican to embrace immigration and be “Kamala-ly” liberal, then it, as well, ought to have been “unTrumpian” to flee Inquisition-era Europe and forge the post-Columbus American nationhood of the last about 600 years. 

Kamala Harris, vice-president and the Democratic Party’s candidate in last month’s US presidential polls, may have been imperfect both as a woman and human being, but she was, as my friend and columnist Tee Ngugi observed, undeniably everything that Trump wasn’t.

And her rejection by Americans at the ballot box serves as both a window onto the typical, hypocritical American thinking around opportunity and merit and repudiation of American exceptionalism.

As Namibia is inducted into the growing community of nations that have accorded women a chance at leadership, including Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Germany, Australia, the UK, Scotland, New Zealand, Italy, Mexico, Canada, Ireland, Malawi, Liberia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Tanzania, South Korea, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Rwanda, the US retains its place among jurisdictions with the dubious reputation of being societies where women being subordinate to men is an eternal, accepted norm.