Last August 2010, Elections Cameroon (ELECAM), a statutory body ordained to organise and manage elections in the country, officially launched voters’ registration, for which it currently uses the media, billboards, church ministers and town criers to call for massive participation. And, despite numerous contentions posed by some opposition political parties, which have persistently classified the ELECAM as a pseudo sub section of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM), given that most of the organization’s decision-makers were picked from strategic bureaus of the ruling party, reports from different regions of the country hold that the pace of registration is fairly good. As of October 13th, according to the ELECAM’s communication head office, about 120,000 eligible voters, out of a target 9 million, expected to vote at the forthcoming 2011 presidential election, had registered across the country.
In his exposé, two weeks ago, the director general of the ELECAM, Fonkam Azu’u, said of the 120,000 already receipted, the Littoral region, the country’s second most populated region, lingers at the bottom. Members of the elections management body, who refused to reveal the regional statistics, have not clearly identified the cause of the looming apathy. While the ELECAM’s communication officer for Littoral, Ghislain Ngangue, hesitantly attributes it to intense call for boycott, propagated by some opposition party leaders, especially the Social Democratic Front (SDF) and associates, others blame the reluctance on acute lost of trust in the national electoral process, given that a series of past elections, be they presidential, parliamentary or municipal, had been grossly manipulated and ruined by the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralization (MINATD), which formerly organized elections.
Yet, many observers do link the lethargy to a calculated stratagem adopted by the ELECAM to disenfranchise the electorate in the Littoral region, indicted as one of the nation’s opposition strongholds. “The more the electoral capacity drops in the Littoral, the more the victory of the ruling party is guaranteed,” a civil society member remarked. “The ELECAM officers have tactfully limited the number of voters’ registration units in the Douala in order to discourage potential voters, who must cover excessive long distances to register.”
It should however be noted that Douala, the headquarters of the Littoral region, is the economic capital of Cameroon, where the hunt for money is paramount. The ELECAM, critics say, must go an extra mile to employ efficient and rapid-result tactics, aimed to convince the over 1 million prospective voters, if the body really intends to organize free, fair and transparent presidential elections in Cameroon.
