Africa: Namibian Ballot Printing Disrupted By Power Outage in South Africa Amid Security Concerns

The entity awarded a controversial tender to produce Namibia’s ballot papers says despite a power outage during the printing process, all ballots remained secure.

A power outage reportedly occurred when Namibian political party representatives were overseeing the design, production, and delivery of ballot papers at Ren-Form CC in South Africa.

The incident happened at the Johannesburg warehouse of Ren-Form CC, which was awarded a controversial N$6.2 million tender to print the ballots for Namibia’s presidential and National Assembly elections, scheduled for 27 November. Ren-Form CC on Tuesday confirmed the incident.

“We can confirm that a brief power interruption occurred. It was immediately resolved within a few minutes by the maintenance team, which discovered the cause to have been a main isolator trip,” Ren-Form legal representative Tshepo Mathopo told The Namibian.

Mathopo said the issue was immediately attended to and power was restored.

“The power interruption was resolved within a few minutes and was not a major power failure affecting the entire production, administration building or municipal area,” he said.

Throughout this, the ballots were secured, Mathopo said.

“There were no ballots out of the secure area at any time during the project running. We deny in the strongest possible terms that any ballot papers were found to be outside of any designated areas.”

Swapo representative Veikko Nekundi says the company refused to answer their queries on the ‘so-called’ power failure at the warehouse.

“Some ballot papers we discovered somewhere. Upon enquiry, the international business development executive of Ren-Form wanted to chase us off the premises, which we refused,” he told The Namibian from South Africa on Tuesday.

Namibia Economic Freedom Fighters (NEFF) spokesperson Teresia Hamurenge on Tuesday said the process for design, production and delivery of ballot papers was not transparent.

“Throughout the whole process, we felt that something was not right. But as they say, if you don’t have facts you can’t really act,” she said.

Ren-Form, however, described the process as “perfectly smooth and transparent”.