Namibia drills more boreholes to save stranded hippos
About 130 hippopotamuses are stranded in the mud in northeastern Namibia, as water levels continue to drop due to severe drought, a government official said Wednesday.
Namibian incumbent leader Hage Geingob won the second term on Saturday, securing 56.3 per cent of the vote in the presidential election, according to the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN).
Geingob defeated independent candidate Panduleni Itula, who received 29.2 per cent, Xinhua reported, citing ECN.
Itula made history as the first independent candidate for the presidency, though he retained his ruling party membership. The leader of the official opposition party, McHenry Venaani, came in third with 5.3%.
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The results showed a sharp decrease in support for Geingob, down from 87% in the previous election in 2014. Public frustration has been high over corruption scandals and unemployment.
In the legislative vote to choose 96 members of parliament, the ruling party lost its two-thirds majority after it secured 63 seats, down from 77, while the official opposition party, Venaani’s Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), will hold 16 seats, improving from its 2014 total of five.
Opposition leader Venaani said that they were considering approaching the courts over “anomalies and irregularities” during the election.
The ECN also announced that the ruling SWAPO party won the parliamentary elections.
A sputtering economy, one of Namibia’s worst-ever droughts and the biggest corruption scandal in its history weighed on support for Geingob.
The economy has been stuck in recession for nearly three years, hurt by a drought that has ravaged agricultural export crops, as well as by unprofitably low prices for Namibia’s main hard commodities, uranium and diamonds.
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