The court has spoken and there is confusion in town. The dust of anxiety raised by the election of the new mayor in Nkongsamba III following the proclamation of the results of the September 30 Municipal election had not completely settled when the Administrative Bench of the Supreme Court announced its verdict declaring the said election as null and void.

The reasons advanced for the cancellation include the political gimmicks that surrounded the selection of the council executive and the confusion set by the Senior Divisional Officer acting as representative of the administration. After failing to convene councillors through letters of invitation, the SDO proceeded to sending SMS to the same councillors who were asked to meet on a different day. Not all the councillors received the second invitation.

The decision to annul the election took all these into consideration but from every indication, the whole blame fell on the Senior Divisional Officer whom the court of justice considered as having set and mismanaged the confusion among councillors. The inability of the representative of the Ministry of Administration and Decentralisation to manage a crisis situation of this magnitude is what seemed to have pushed the court to rule against the SDO especially as the situation led to the exclusion of some councillors from taking part in the election of the mayor and his assistant.

Even though the court decision was described as a strong message, many lawyers who defended the 120 petitions filed in on the Municipal election by political parties and individuals have so far expressed their disappointment that all but one were rejected. One of the lawyers stated inter alia that either Cameroonian lawyers are incompetent or the country’s judges are malicious or politically influenced.

The Nkongsamba III case, it should be pointed out, may just be one out of many. Some of the reasons advanced for rejecting petitions submitted in court have nothing to do with the validity of the problems therein. When a petition is rejected because of non respect of procedure, it does not necessarily mean the problem did not exist. In the same vein, failure to provide adequate proof does not annul the fact that there was a problem somewhere.

That is the most interesting thing about the law. In other words, failure to respect procedure in filing in a case takes precedence over the value of the case. That said, without dwelling much on the legal aspect of the just ended election, it is important to underscore the high level of politicking that occurred during the whole exercise and the fact that this situation served as a litmus test for the administration even though it had very limited role to play in the polls.

Perhaps the court’s decision was equally triggered by this interpretation. From the look of things, the SDO for Mungo is not necessarily blamed for overstepping legal boundary since he was still the one to convene the meeting to elect the mayor and his assistant. His fault was that of setting confusion in the process of convening the said meeting. In other words, he failed to respect the law.  Whatever the case, the strong message is that the administration should stay out of political gimmicks to avoid.