A DECISION on the challenge to Namibia's presidential and National Assembly elections three months ago will be given in the High Court in Windhoek tomorrow afternoon.

After two long days of hearing arguments on the challenge to the elections, Judge President Petrus Damaseb announced to a packed courtroom late yesterday afternoon that his and Judge Collins Parker's decision in the case will be given at 14h30 tomorrow.

Nine political parties - the Rally for Democracy and Progress, DTA, UDF, Nudo, Congress of Democrats, All People's Party, Republican Party, Namibia Democratic Movement for Change, and Democratic Party of Namibia - and their candidates in the presidential election are asking the High Court to annul and set aside the National Assembly and presidential elections of November 27 and 28 last year, or if that is not done, to order a recount of votes cast in those elections.

The Electoral Commission of Namibia and Swapo, which was declared the winner of the National Assembly election, are defending the case.

They have raised a range of technical legal points on which they argue the elections challenge should be dismissed out of hand.

The nine parties are claiming that the elections were marred by irregularities and violations of the Electoral Act to such an extent that they should be set aside and a re-run of the polls should take place.

One of the technical points raised by South African senior counsel Ishmael Semenya, who is leading the legal team representing Swapo in the case, yesterday afternoon was that the applicants should also have cited as respondents in the case the 54 people on Swapo's list of candidates for the National Assembly election who were declared as having been elected to the NA, since they have a direct interest in the matter.

Semenya also argued that it was not enough for the parties to have tried to show to the court that irregularities occurred in the election process.

They should have shown that these had such an impact on the elections that they resulted in an undue election of candidates to the NA. They did not succeed in doing this, he argued.

As for the presidential poll, Semenya argued, the challenge to that election is not even before the court, because the requirement in the Electoral Act that an applicant in an election case has to furnish security for legal costs to the Registrar of the High Court has not been complied with. Security for costs has been furnished only with respect to the National Assembly election challenge.

Albert Strydom, who is one of the lawyers representing the nine opposition parties, replied to Semenya's argument on the failure to join Swapo's 54 elected candidates in the National Assembly election by pointing out to the court that Swapo, which he said is the instrument that would take the candidates to Parliament, has been cited as a respondent.

During an extended court session on Monday, senior counsel Reinhard Tötemeyer, who is leading the nine parties' legal team, argued that the Electoral Act stipulates that the election results must be posted at each polling station, and does not allow for verified results from verification centres to be announced as final election results.

"In fact the Act as amended last year does not mention verification centres," Tötemeyer, argued.

The verification process is done at the polling station, he added.

Tötemeyer, told the court that ECN officials failed to post election results at 90 polling stations in 41 constituencies in the country. "This major transgression takes the integrity out of the whole elections," he argued.

He also told the court that evidence was found that in ten regions, at several polling stations, voters' registration numbers were not written on ballot paper counterfoils as required. The parties claim that 16 357 counterfoils were found without voter registration numbers written on them.

"This is a serious flaw and leaves the door wide open for ballot box stuffing," Tötemeyer, argued.

He argued that the election process, starting with the registration of voters and compilation of voter registers, was conducted in an inefficient and incompetent way, to such an extent that a mere recount of ballot papers will not remedy all the flaws, but that this could only be done through a re-election.

Vincent Maleka, another South African senior counsel who is leading the ECN's legal team, also argued yesterday that the challenge to the presidential election is not properly before the court, because it was filed ten days after the 30-day limit following on the announcement of the election results that is stipulated in the Electoral Act. The application on the presidential election "is a non-starter", Maleka said.

The National Assembly election challenge was also filed late, as it was accepted at the office of the High Court Registrar at 16h30 on January 4 - which was after that office's closing time of 15h00, Maleka argued.

On the claim that results were not posted at numerous polling stations after they had been counted there, Maleka told the court that the ECN had replied to these claims by filing affidavits from presiding officers at polling stations who denied that results were not posted as required. The nine parties did not persist with their claims when they replied to the ECN's response, with the result that the court should accept the ECN's denials of these claims, he argued.

Even if results were not posted at some polling stations, that is not fatal to the entire election, he argued.

"The will of the people was expressed. The will of the people was counted," he said, telling the court that this was what was important as far as the pro-cess at polling stations was concerned.

The parties have also claimed that when they inspected election material in late December and the first days of January, some books of ballot papers were discovered that did not appear to have been printed by the same South African printer that produced the official ballots used in the elections. That claim takes the applicants' case nowhere, as it deals with ballot books and papers that were never used in any event, Maleka told the court during his argument.

In his reply yesterday, Tötemeyer, persisted with his argument that the alleged irregularities, which he said stretched through the whole election process, call for a setting aside of the entire election.