Their preliminary declaration was made public at a press conference in Yaounde on Thursday.

The organisation and conduct of the September 30, 2013 local council and parliamentary elections in Cameroon has been described by the African Union Observer Mission to the country as generally satisfactory.

The mission’s leader, Hon. Azizou El Hadj Issa, who was sitting in for former Ghanaian President, John Agyekum Kufour, told journalists at a press conference in Yaounde on October 3, 2013 that preliminary findings from field reports indicated a general improvement in election organisation and fluidity in polling stations visited by the 36 observers deployed all over the national territory.

The legal framework put in place by government, according to the mission, permitted Cameroonians to freely choose their representatives for the National Assembly as well as councillors. The mission reported that polling stations visited opened on time, had all electoral material and were accessible. It lauded Elections Cameroon for dispatching election material even to far-flung areas.

Weaknesses

“The use of indelible ink was not uniform,” the mission noted. El Hadj Issa noticed that in some polling stations, ink used for thumb prints was not really indelible while in others, both inks were not used. The same thing, he said, applied to the use of voters’ cards and National Identity Cards. “The legal obligation to present both cards before voting was not observed in some polling stations,” he noted.

Strengths   

The mission saluted the putting in place of special ballots in Braille for blind voters. It also praised the marked improvement in women’s representation in the composition of lists of candidates as well as their massive participation in voting.

Recommendations

The need for a permanent exchange forum with all political stakeholders, the reinforcement of mechanisms to ameliorate women representation in politics as per the Protocol on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, he said, was indispensable. El Hadj Issa also said there was need to ameliorate the centralisation and forwarding of results.

The mission also proposed the legal reformation of Elections Cameroon to correspond to international norms. The need to embrace the announcement of results through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is also essential if Cameroon is to be a model in election organisation on the continent. It said there was need to study and bring down voting age from 20 to 18 years. Also, it would be better to put in place the use of one ballot paper in upcoming polls.

The press conference was conducted in the presence of political party leaders like Issa Tchiroma Bakary of the Cameroon National Salvation Front (CNSF) who praised the quality of the report. Senator Pierre Flambeau Ngayap, Secretary General of the National Union for Democracy and Progress (NUDP), found fault with some aspects of the report.