The report under the headline: "Civil Society sceptical about elections ..." under the ownership of the Joint Observer Mission (JOM) of the Namibia Non-Governmental Organization Forum Trust NANGOF and the SADC Council of NGOs (SADC-CNGO), is misleading.

The report is described by its authors as "unique in that unlike those of other observer missions that concentrated primarily on the voting days, it focussed on the pre-election, election and post election phases" .

The intention behind this report could be misleading judging from its timing of release and the harsh judgement that it has passed on the electoral body that (1) "The pre-election phase has fallen short of meeting the requirements, benchmarks and standards for the holding of free and fair elections" (2) The election phase was only acceptable "up to the counting of ballots, when it started to derail" and (3) The post-election phase as "marked by a state of uncertainty".

When one reads a report of this nature, it sometimes requires a high level of concentration to deconstruct how the degree of its abstractness is intentionally adopted to ignore the concrete conditions that confront Namibia as a nation state which in this case are: (1) The level of national capacity and development, which incidentally should be the agenda of developmental NGOS (as opposed to political NGOs); (2) The country's technological capacity, and (3) The degree of partnership and collaboration between Government, NGOs, political parties, the electoral body, media and the private sector to promote, fund and support the holding of regular elections as a measure of democratic participation.

Despite the fact that each of these entities has its role to play in enhancing our capacity to perfect the electoral system, unfortunately, many of these partners are stuck on the fence from where they criticize at will, sometimes in a way that subject the nation to international rejection and isolation.

Capacity in this sense includes the following: (1) Technological capacity to conduct elections so as to "meet the benchmarks and standards" that the Nangof body seems to prescribe to the electoral body and the nation at large; (2) The human capacity that a country requires to enhance electoral efficiency and proficiency; (3) Consensual capacity (partnership) on the part of the stakeholders to understand and accept that democracy can only survive if each of the parties (stakeholders) takes responsibility for what it is capable to contribute to make the experiment work.

The issue of capacity for example is perhaps indirectly addressed in the Nangof report in its reference to Voter Education where the body expressed concern about its "inadequacy" without qualifying that most of the NANGOF constituents have been agents of voter education throughout the process because it was not yet mandated as an ECN activity.

This is where the NGO community was expected to provide technical backstopping and if not take their share of responsibility and blame as national development partners.

This is where sitting on the fence and passing harsh judgement on fellow institutions caught in the quagmire of lack of national capacity will not help this country to move forward.

It is not a secret that the high level of unemployment directly coupled to the high rate of school drop-outs, necessitated the nation to employ more unemployed youth to help them earn temporary income during the electoral process.

It is not a secret that the more people you employ on the field due to lack of technology, the more your system will be susceptible to inefficiency.

In countries where electronic voting machines are employed, efficiency is increased because part of the election phase that the Nangof report describes as "counting of ballots" that leads into its report's conclusion of "uncertainty" apparently due to the delay in announcing results, will no longer exist.

Finally, complete efficiency is only possible if the total number of people employed to manage a given system is small and they are easy to control and supervise.

It is also inconceivable for this report to not state that the actual supervision and monitoring of the process involved multiple stakeholders, each representing its own constituency.

It is equally positive to note that the Nangof report acknowledges and commends the leadership of the Ministry of Safety and Security for executing their mandate free from political interference, fear of favour and instructing their subordinates to act likewise.

However, the report falls conspicuously short of stating that the police were not only confined to the role prescribed in that report. They also monitored and supervised the process in their own ways to ensure transparency, credibility and security of the system itself (including the receiving of results the report debunked was "done under a cloak of secrecy") obviously to advance a different perspective.

Elections are not easy games and this one was not. But in the end Namibians have voted and they want to take a long break away from the ruthless game of politics.

They want to take time with their families to enjoy the festive period.

But it is very unfortunate that politicians, especially Namibian politicians, want to play the masses against each other just because of their own selfish interest of getting to Parliament.

They forget that ordinary people benefit nothing from their fat cheques in Parliament. Politicians forget that the masses lack basic services such as shelter, water and bread in their shacks. These are the things that our NGO community as development agents should be more concerned about instead of patronizing certain political views that are in line with the doctrine and ideologies of the countries that fund these NGOs.

The NGO community should not continue to be enthralled in a cloak of dust left by yet another election that has passed and judged by international standards and benchmarks to have been free, transparent and legitimate.

For example, the CCN has set a good example of stating its position on these elections early and clearly before the field was fermented with intervening factors.

I want to salute Ms Kapere, its Secretary General, for that.

Finally, I want to state for the sake of progress that my intention is not to reject the Nangof report in its totality, but to only point out some of the issues that could have been overlooked during its compiling. The report could be relevant because it is raising issues and ideas that ought to be considered for future planning.

The only danger remains that while the intention of the report may be positive and without ill-intent, the timing of its release added to the uncertainty and strengthened the agenda of those contesting or doubting the elections in addition to the confusion generated by the fluctuating messages passed by the media to the public. On the one hand the Presidential and National Assembly Elections of 2009 were described as free, fair and transparent while the next day the same reporters inserted certain undertone that it suffered from irregularities and were therefore not credible. This also fed conveniently into the ongoing contestation of election results.

Finally, I am concerned that we are failing to tell the public that the concept of fairness presupposes the conventional wisdom that absolute credibility or perfection of elections is nearly impossible because of factors and specifically the level of development stage and capacity that each nation finds itself at the time of democratization.

This point was correctly pointed out by Fanuel Kaapama, a political scientist from the University of Namibia in the last edition of Talk of the Nation on Monday January 04, 2010.

I wish that debates of that nature could be regularly organized to help our beloved country to understand and appreciate the issues and challenges that confront our democratic experiment to counter the effect of party politics and media hegemony.

Namibia is slowly getting there the need to enhance national capacity at all levels is a collective mandate. We need a strong partnership between the civic organizations, government, private sector, political leaders, the electoral body, the media and even donors to enhance our democratic experiment. Namibia is making progress, I do not think that there is any constitutional crisis .

Dr Rukee Tjingaete has written this piece in his own capacity as a critical scholar. Therefore these views do not represent those of any institution. Dr Tjingaete is a PhD holder from Michigan State University (United States) in the field of mass media.