He was defeated in a bid for the party's presidential nomination in 2004 and left SWAPO to form an opposition group, the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP), in 2007.
Hamutenya attended primary school at Odibo and Engela and then participated at the Augustineum Teachers Training College in Okahandja from 1959 to 1961.
[2][8] Hamutenya made political upheavals in the second part of the new millennium when he left the Swapo party and founded the Rally for Democracy and Progress which performed well as a fledgling party in its first elections in 2009 by becoming the official opposition with 11,31 % of the vote against SWAPO's 75,27 % The RDP's rapid advance was followed by an equally rapid plummet in the 2014 elections when it failed to make any inroads and lost the title of Official Opposition to the DTA of Namibia by attracting 3,51 % of the vote against SWAPO's 80,01%.
[1] Hamutenya received the 13th highest number of votes—352—in the election to the Central Committee of SWAPO at the party's August 2002 congress.
[9] In May 2004 Hamutenya sought SWAPO's nomination as its candidate for the presidential election which took place later in 2004;[3][10] his candidacy was proposed by Mosé Penaani Tjitendero and seconded by Hartmut Ruppel.
In September 2010, Hamutenya and eight other opposition politicians were sworn in as members of the National Assembly following a six-month boycott due to electoral irregularities in the 2009 election.
[13] The RDP performed poorly in the 2014 general election, and Hamutenya subsequently faced pressure from within the party to retire.
[16] While Axali Doëseb is commonly credited with writing both its music and text, Hamutenya in 2006 claimed that he authored the lyrics himself.