POLITICAL parties launched a flurry of election manifestos over the past few weeks, but it seems they have very little impact on voters.

"I don't think manifestos sway many votes - at this election (as at previous elections) the overriding factors will still be the history of the liberation struggle, the personal appeal of leaders, and ethnic affiliation," Graham Hopwood, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, told The Namibian.

However, he suggests that with a better-educated born-free generation emerging this will change over time and there will be more interest in policy platforms in the future.

"Younger people will start to look at the issues more closely."

The political parties unleashed their wordy, often lengthy election promises on the electorate amid much pomp, with leaders assuring supporters that their party was the only logical choice to rule the country after this year's election.

Only the Monitor Action Group of Kosie Pretorius refrained from launching a manifesto. The closest MAG gets to a manifesto or election programme is a single page with a 10-point argument on various issues.

They do not campaign, have no public rallies or meetings and refrain from going out to recruit members. In fact, going to the post office to post pamphlets is what campaigning means to MAG.

Other parties write pages and pages about women and economic empowerment, job creation, health, education, reduction of crime rate and even rural toilets for the poor.

Alois Gende of the DTA once said on manifestos: "You can write a very good manifesto, but people don't read manifestos - they ask who is the leader, where does he come from, is he respectable, is he a strong leader, is he from my region?"

A book published by the Namibia Institute for Democracy (NID) four years ago, and edited by its current executive director Justine Hunter, said: "ideology itself does not seem to play a large role in Namibian politics" while there was also "no evidence that party positions and manifestos have played a large role in post-Independence Namibia".

Hunter said the view remained the same today.

Hopwood suggest that parties should produce two documents.

The first must be a detailed manifesto that sets out their policies and presents the party as a government in waiting while the second one should be a populist pamphlet produced in a range of languages which contains a summary of the party's core beliefs and key policies.

They must distribute the second one widely - while the more detailed version is available for those who want to look at policy details.

"Manifestos matter to a certain extent for the credibility of a party. So you see most party leaders waving their manifestos at rallies - because they need to demonstrate that they have a set of policies. But it's true that very few people read them and for the most part they are boring documents," Hopwood said.

Many of the policies are similar.

For Swapo it is a condensed version of bigger policy documents like the National Development Plan.

This year the ruling party Swapo carefully avoids setting itself any definite five-year targets on job creation, poverty reduction, number of schools and clinics to be established, for example.

"The overall impression is quite bland. Most of the opposition parties pitch policies that are similar to Swapo's - perhaps where they differ most is on the issue of implementation.

The opposition seems to be saying that Swapo is good on fine-sounding words, but less good on delivery of policy goals," Hopwood said.

However, the opposition's plans for the country often lack in detail - especially as to how policy objectives would be achieved.

Hopwood agreed, saying that no opposition party attempted to seriously cost their proposals and then explain to the voter how their taxes would be used to pay for such proposals.

For now, mudslinging, and not what is in the manifesto, seems to be key to thousands of votes.