The raison d’être of the briefing last Friday was to present the level of preparedness.

The Deputy Director General of Elections in ELECAM, Erik Essousse, held talks on April 12, 2013 in Yaounde with national and international observers for the first ever election into the Senate that held in Cameroon yesterday, April 14, 2013. The briefing focused on the organisation of polls.

The ELECAM Deputy Director General invited observers to be objective and impartial during the election. He pointed out that necessary security measures had been taken to make sure that the polls went well. Erik Essousse told observers that election supervisory teams had undergone training while all voting material was already dispatched to polling stations. For Local Polling Commissions comprising different stakeholders, Erik Essousse said all was already in place.

After watching a video produced by the communication unit of ELECAM on how the exercise was going to look like, some observers were surprised at the FCFA 50,000 to be handed to each councillor after voting. The answer was simple, the Deputy Director General of elections said. “We are working as per the country’s Electoral Code”, he told observers.

Quizzed on why accreditation for observers had to come from the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation while elections are organised and managed by ELECAM, Erik Essousse noted that there were many actors in the exercise. He gave the example of accreditation for the media by the Ministry of Communication.