The divisional team headed by Dr Fuh Calistus Gentry met in Nkambe last Saturday.

Donga-Mantung Division in the North West Region is halfway gone into their target for the biometric voter registration ahead of upcoming elections in the country. “Our target is around 111,000 voters and as at the meeting of Saturday February 2, we were hovering around 50 per cent mark,” the CPDM Divisional Coordinator of the registration exercise, Dr. Fuh Calistus Gentry, Secretary of State in the Ministry of Mines, Industries and Technological Development, told Cameroon Tribune after one of their traditional monthly evaluation meetings in Nkambe last weekend. By then, the Division had registered 52,373 voters.

Their strategy from the beginning was the holding of monthly meetings at the level of the Division in a rotatory manner in each Sub-division through which they came face-to-face with real obstacles on the ground. “For example in Nwa, we found that the conflict among political leaders in the area stalled the registration process.  We went into mediation and the figures jumped from 5,000 to 11,000 registered voters as at Saturday in the Sub-division. We also identified the problem of identity cards that had been abandoned in their thousands and we decided to divide the identity cards into villages and the elite pasted the names in vantage positions in the villages so that these people are identified and registered immediately.

The elite, Dr Fuh Calistus noted, are making good use of the free issuance of identity cards as ordered by the Head of State. “We decided to maximise it and in key but remote places like Ako and Nwa where registration centres were either absent or not working, we decided to put the SDO as the head of the committee and made some funds available where temporal registration centres were created. We also created a task force whose duty is to take the old voter registration list and compare with the new one to see who has not yet registered and go door-to-door to get them registered.”

Saturday’s meeting also served as an opportunity for areas that are succeeding in the voter registration exercise to share their experiences with others so the entire Division wholly succeeds in the exalting exercise. “These were on-the-spot measures which we hope will greatly boost the registration exercise so that by February 28 when the operation rounds off; we would have hit our target,” the Coordinator said. The meeting was attended among others by the regional coordination committee.