By
Chinje Hopeson in Yaounde
The announcement made last week by the director general of Elections
Cameroon (ELECAM), Sani Tanimou, that the revision of the electoral register
will begin all over the national territory on October 3, 2012 and end on
February 28, 2013 has caused many tempers to flare. Opposition figures and
civil society leaders across the country have reacted bitterly, arguing
forcefully that there are absolutely no chances of the 2013 council and
parliamentary elections being free and fair.
According to officials of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), the leading
opposition political party in Cameroon, the announced biometric process will
not respect the norm universally recognized with respect to this issue. In the
words of Joshua Osih, the second national vice president of the SDF, this norm
makes electoral biometry a computer technique based on two essential stages.
The first stage, he says, is identification which has to be followed
immediately by the delivery of the biometric card. The second is authentication
which is the stage enabling verification, through a kit installed in each
polling station, that the data concerning the voter recorded at the time of
voting conforms to the information contained on the biometric card.
Unfortunately, however, the president of the electoral board of ELECAM has made
it clear that there will be no authentication kit.
“Having only identification kits without delivering voters’ cards
immediately after registration,” Joshua Osih maintains, “tells of a divided and
inconceivable neo-biometry which totally discredits the sincerity of this
operation. This typically Cameroonian specialty which blocks transparency and
democracy is a final provocation which, if nothing is done, will destroy the
entire electoral process which is only at its beginning.”
The firebrand critic of the system equally points out the fact that the
software to be used in the identification phase has never been tested publicly
in the presence of all the electoral actors to enable them to evaluate the
degree of reliability of the different kits. This, in his own words, is a way
that ELECAM wants to use to deprive Cameroonians of transparent elections.
Albert Dzongang, the president of “La Dynamique” party, has equally
deplored this “Cameroonian biometry” which he calls a façade. He says ELECAM is
not competent enough to organize free and fair elections. Hear him:
“…we don’t recognize in ELECCAM, through those who make up the organ,
the competence of organizing elections. We have requested that an organ
consisting of Cameroonians who are serious, acceptable and capable of doing
something in the fear of God and by thinking of the future of their country, be
given the responsibility of organizing elections. They can be civil servants;
that is not a problem. But everybody knows that at this moment, ELECAM is composed
of people who are used for a specific purpose and who are there only to satisfy
the person who gave them the opportunity to have something to eat…”
The same outcry is made by Dr. Hilaire Kamga, the president of the civil
society platform in Cameroon. After the declaration of the director general of
ELECAM, he made the following observation to the press:
“…there can only be a serious biometric revision if all the actors
involved in the electoral process are trained…on the biometric technology and
on the mode of operation adopted by ELECAM for this exercise…the electoral law,
which is itself an insult to our intelligence, provides that registration is
done by ELECAM in collaboration with…mixed commissions. To this day, the
training has not involved the members of these mixed commissions in many cases.
Therefore there cannot be a credible registration process if officials of
ELECAM and members of these mixed commissions are not trained in biometry. And
given the information that is presently available, it is impossible for ELECAM
to carry out all these trainings before the famous October 3.”
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