A total of 103 petitions have been filed to Cameroon’s highest court to annul results of this month’s legislative elections that handed President Paul Biya’s governing party a landslide victory, a court official said on Monday.
A number of the 45 parties figuring on the election lists on July 22 had filed petitions, but most of the appeals came from the main opposition parties, especially the Social Democratic Front (SDF), the supreme court official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Opposition parties have charged that the legislative and municipal votes were marred by ”massive fraud”, and SDF chief John Fru Ndi called on Monday for the results to be declared void.
”The elections should be annulled,” he told Agence France-Presse in a telephone interview.
”We would ask for this even if SDF had won all of them. These elections disgrace Cameroon. They have proven that Cameroon is an extremely corrupt country,” he added.
In their petitions, the political parties called for results to be invalidated in places they claimed votes had been miscounted, people had voted multiple times and party representatives had been banned from polling stations.
They also said fraud had been rampant and that their members had been intimidated.
The Supreme Court, which is also temporarily serving as Cameroon’s constitutional court, has 20 days after the vote to address the lawsuits and declare the final election results.
According to almost complete provisional results published last week by authorities, President Biya’s Democratic Rally of the Cameroonian People (RDPC) won at least 152 of the 180 seats in the National Assembly, while the opposition garnered less than 20.
Fru Ndi, however, insisted that his party had in fact won 70 National Assembly seats.
”Biya and his group have impoverished Cameroonians so as to be able to easily buy them afterwards,” he said, vowing to ”sensitise” the population ”to the actions of the RDPC”. — AFP
