The west African state of Cameroon was on Sunday making a second try at holding parliamentary and local government elections, a week after a first attempt had to be scrubbed at the last minute because voting materials were not ready.
Initial indications were that the elections, which the party of long-time President Paul Biya was expected to win easily, were going according to plan, although turnout appeared to be low at polling stations in the capital Yaounde.
After last week’s debacle, Biya sacked his interior minister, and the head of the company that had been charged with printing voting materials.
Biya has held power since 1982 and is looking to maintain a comfortable majority in the parliament. In the outgoing legislature his party held 116 of the 180 seats, while the main opposition Social Democratic Front (SDF) had 43.
Voter turnout appeared to be relatively light earlier in the day but officials said the numbers swelled after the conclusion of the football World Cup final, which here as elsewhere had viewers glued to their screens.
”The voting really started after the match,” one polling station official said.
Some 4,5-million voters were eligible to cast ballots for both national assembly deputies and for councillors to serve in 366 local authorities in the west African nation, a former French colony with a sizeable English-speaking minority.
The registered electorate was seen as low in a country of 18-million people.
”I got my card, but my wife didn’t,” retired civil servant Jean-Marie Tchapkui, an avowed supporter of Biya’s Democratic Rally of the Cameroon People (RDPC), said.
Some national newspapers had warned that the system for distributing voter cards was vulnerable to fraud, accusing local officials who support Biya of handing them out only to people likely to vote for the RDPC.
Joseph Kouemo, a mechanic from the Melen neighbourhood of the capital, said that ”70% of voters in my district didn’t get their cards”, citing six members of his family by way of example.
In order to have a hope of voting, people in his situation were forced to go from polling station to polling station to try to find their names on the rolls.
Voting apparently went ahead without hitches in Ebolowa, the chief town in Biya’s native Southern Province, where the queues were reportedly long.
The election had been scheduled to take place on June 23 but the president called it off, after polling stations had already opened, on the grounds that ballot papers had not been printed by the state firm responsible and other materials were not ready.
Biya dismissed his interior minister and the printing firm’s boss, giving electoral officials another week to prepare for the election.
Observers have warned of a repeat of pre-electoral unrest which injured around 10 people earlier this month in clashes in the northwest between activists from the RDPC and the SDF, led by John Fru Ndi, an English-speaker.
Police have mounted a vast operation in Cameroon’s 10 provinces in a bid to ensure the election passes off without violence.
The government and the national electoral observatory, Onel, said on Saturday the poll could go ahead under decent conditions and voting material was ready.
Cameroon adopted a multi-party political system in 1990 and numerous political parties have sprung up since then. Few, however, have a real agenda, with some promising voters no more than happiness and well-being.
On Friday, a group of opposition parties, including the SDF and the National Union for Democracy and Progress (UNDP), complained that some of their candidates had been barred from standing because their names were not on ballot papers.
All legal pre-vote deadlines for the ballot papers were missed in the run-up to last weekend’s cancelled vote and new papers were not printed before mid-week, when rulings were handed down in lawsuits over the missing documents.
That meant candidates had to wait until the last minute to find out if they had been included on the ballot papers. – Sapa-AFP