Voters’ registration has over the years, been a very important issue in the appraisal of the electoral process. The announcement, a few days ago, that the registration of voters was going to start, in earnest, in the second half of the month of August, could only have been received with welcome relief; for good reason.

For a very, very long time, such promises had never taken off the ground. And the fact that the Director General Of Elections, Alhaji Mohaman Taminou Sani personally came up front to make the announcement cannot be an error.

The voters’ registration process is a hide-and-seek kind of issue as the process has been all along. But this time, there seems to be some business to take seriously, least of which is not the recent tour the Director General has made across the country installing the various organs, at regional, divisional and lower levels, to ensure that the electoral process is well carried out and without such hitches as those which, in the past years, threw doubts as to the effectiveness, independence and credibility of the elections control organ at various levels, in such a way as to give across-the-board recognition to elections.

In an interview with Cameroon Tribune last week, the Director General of Elections spoke of the preparedness of his body to organise a hitch-free election. And when one talks of an election, the one that comes readily to mind is the presidential election of 2011 as per the official electoral calendar. This comes with stakes. Very special stakes, indeed; as it is the president of the Republic going to emerge from that election, that will carry Cameroon into achieving the objectives of the millennium and, of course, chatting the way, for the attainment of the objectives set aside by the current President of the Republic, to make Cameroon, an emerging nation by the year 2035. But other Cameroonians are warming up to take the challenge and be the ones to take up that objective. On the frontlines are the Social Democratic Front, the Progressive Movement, the Cameroon Democratic Union and other opposition political parties which continue to think that ELECAM has shortcomings; and they have continued to make their points of view heard, silently and, even, noisily in press organs ever-ready to publicise their viewpoints.

Critics have very often pointed to the Cameroonian habit of never making good use of their own laws, referring very often to the good laws that exist and the apathy shown to such laws by the very actors. The real stakes in the coming elections will be in the capacity of ordinary citizens to appropriate existing laws to themselves in such a way as to obtain the maximum benefits, that is, election results that reflect the real aspirations of the people and not those which continue to attract controversy.

The Director General of Elections has, in the most official manner, said registration of voters will start in mid-August. This means all the stakeholders in the process should start warming up to ensure that they are part of the process. ELECAM is even going the extra-mile to launch a media campaign to ensure that as many as possible people get registered.

It even projected a voter population of about 9 million and any figure short of that will only come to confirm the usually-decried voter apathy which no one would like to see for an election for which the winners are being charged to take Cameroon into the status of an emerging economy in the very years ahead.