IMAGE: AI-generated image of an elderly lady who appears to have collapsed (Unknown / Namibia Fact Check)
Claims of the ruling party presidential candidate having ‘collapsed’ at a party campaign event continue to swirl despite a lack of visual evidence
The questions around the health of the ruling Swapo Party candidate for the 2024 presidential election, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, really became a prominent electoral information landscape issue following claims that she ‘collapsed’ at a party rally at Otjiwarongo, in the Otjozondjupa Region, on 26 October 2024.
A partisan X account, The Windhoek Times, was one of the first social media accounts that started speculation about the ‘collapse’, with its post on 27 October 2024 attracting over 40,000 views and hundreds of engagements, including many comments.
The X post of The Windhoek Times of 27 October, a day after the claimed ‘collapse’ of the Swapo Party presidential election candidate, was among the first to amplify the claim.
Another social media profile that contributed to the ‘collapse’ claim becoming viral was that of the opposition Affirmative Repositioning movement leader, Job Amupanda, who repeated the claim as if it were fact that Swapo’s Nandi-Ndaitwah had ‘collapsed’.
The ‘collapse’ narrative and the associated health questions around Nandi-Ndaitwah were then picked up and further amplified by the media on 27 October, which approached the ruling party to respond to the questions around its candidate’s health, with the party unsurprisingly denying that such a ‘collapse’ had occurred and calling on those spreading the ‘collapse’ narrative to stop ‘rumour-mongering’.
However, the narrative refused to go away and continued to follow the ruling party candidate up to and beyond the 27 November elections. The narrative was even further embellished in November 2024 when the claim that Nandi-Ndaitwah had ‘collapsed’ a second time started circulating in social media spaces. The two-collapse claim was repeated by a senior editor at the NBC, Anna Nicodemus, while being interviewed by another broadcaster, South Africa-based Newzroom Afrika, in early December 2024. Nicodemus was suspended by the state broadcaster as a result of speculating about the alleged ‘collapse’ of the by then confirmed Namibian president-elect. Nandi-Ndaitwah herself used a ruling party victory rally in early December 2024 to criticise those who were still repeating the ‘collapse’ narrative following the announcement of the elections results.
At the same time the ruling party continued to maintain that there was nothing wrong with the health of the Namibian president-elect.
The facts
It should be noted that the Otjiwarongo Swapo Party rally of 26 October 2024 was attended by hundreds, if not thousands, of people, many of whom possessed smartphones with cameras. Furthermore, the national broadcaster, the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), had a camera crew there which filmed the speeches, including that of Nandi-Ndaitwah. This is mentioned in order to point out that despite the presence of multitudes of camera-enabled smartphones and a television broadcast crew of the national broadcaster, no photos or footage has been seen or made public to date that shows the ruling party candidate ‘collapsing’ at any point during the rally.
This is a crucial point because while it is possible to view many online recordings or photographs by attendees of the rally in question, none show Nandi-Ndaitwah ‘collapsing’. To emphasise, if a ‘collapse’ actually occurred it is simply implausible and impossible that nobody at the event recorded or photographed it, or that nobody would have posted a visual or videoclip online or provided such to the media. The only visuals depicting, and poorly so, Nandi-Ndaitwah collapsing are an AI-generated image and videoclip that started circulating in the days following the first reports of the claimed ‘collapse’.
Because of this lack of visual evidence, Namibia Fact Check considers the claim that the Swapo Party presidential candidate and Namibian president-elect, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, had ‘collapsed’ on 26 October to be unproven.
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This is an output of and for the Elections Fact Checking Coalition of Namibian media and civil society partners combating election-related misinformation.