The real debate about ELECAM is if the new organ can organise credible elections and make a clean break with the electoral nightmares of the past. Sorry its organisation shows clearly that it cannot .and therefore does not represent an advance on the electoral system in Cameroon. This is the real debate that Paul Biya cleverly avoided by provoking a huge storm of protest which was the sure consequence of his gross violation of the law on appointments to the ELECAM board. It seems certain that when the debate is over he will review his list and get Cameroonians praising him for that. That way he will proudly tell his foreign partners that Cameroonians have accepted ELECAM. What a clever political animal the president is!
Humans are political animals. But Paul Biya easily qualifies as a political beast. Every move of his is the unfailing outcome of political calculation. And, in the pure tradition of Machiavelli, the 16th century Italian prince, better leave out morality in politics.
The ELECAM debate is raging. Most of the persons the president appointed to its board are well-known senior functionaries of the ruling CPDM. The appointments are such a glaring violation of the law which demands independent (i.e. non-partisan) persons of personal integrity i.e. “reputed … intellectual honesty.”
Going by that stipulation Dorothy Limunga Njeuma and Cecile Bomba Nkolo who are members of the CPDM political bureau, the party’s policy-making organ could never by any stretch of the imagination have been placed on the board.
By the same argument there is no reason on earth for Samuel Fonkam Azu’u who is (as he often unabashedly presents himself about, just in case you didn’t know him) a member of the CPDM Central Committee, another high-level organ of the party. Several of the other members are party operatives at other levels.
In the heat of the debate Rene Sadi the CPDM secretary-general announced on Thursday that all of his party’s members appointed to ELECAM had turned in their resignations.
That, of course, only confirms the point, which is that Paul Biya violated the law in appointing them in the first place! And in any case, resigning from the CPDM does not guarantee their political neutrality which is the spirit of the law.
The violation is so monumental that some people, rather than preoccupy themselves with so fundamental a point are looking deeper if there isn’t some hidden motive to it all. For the reputed political schemer that Paul Biya is it would be more likely to be so than that he made so glaring a mistake. The president has in fact done something similar before.
Fru Ndi’s House Arrest
The two months’ house arrest of John Fru Ndi, his presidential challenger in October 1992 might provide some clue. Having hijacked victory from the presumed winner of the presidential election of that year Paul Biya took a calculated risk and boldly held Fru Ndi and his 27 party colleagues at his residence in Bamenda.
Cameroonians and the international community had just begun raising a hue and cry over the electoral fraud when Biya suddenly changed the issue! It worked perfectly. Free Fru Ndi, free the SDF chairman! Why arrest him! What has he done? Doesn’t the SDF have a right to contest the result of the election?
The debate had changed! Biya thus cut off much of those biting attacks and negative foreign media comments. He was then sworn in and began picking up the pieces of his battered regime in desperate want of legitimacy.
Meanwhile Fru Ndi and his cohorts languished under arrest. Appeals from abroad inundated Yaounde while goodwill missions from all over Cameroon and abroad travelled to Bamenda to console the SDF chairman.
One month passed and instead of yielding, Biya worsened matters by transferring the detainees to Kondengui prison in Yaounde, further strengthening his position. By the end of two months Fru Ndi and his colleagues had become badly beaten and demoralised. The prisoners, their families, friends and fellow-partisans were only too joyed when Biya at long last released them.
Fru Ndi sulked for the next two or three years over his “stolen victory” and no one would succeed to urge him to let go and get over his resentment. For Biya, he had won a major political victory. Not only had he “stolen” his victory, he had also very successfully managed the potential damage to his fragile regime.
By boldly, if riskily, changing the issue from what should have been uncontrolled and acrimonious cries of thief! thief! give us back our victory and whatever that might have led to, Biya successfully held the situation under control and took the sting out of it for himself.
It is the measure of that success that opened vistas of future defiance and electoral theft to the president and his election organisers at MINATD! Success begets success, don’t they say?
How does all this relate to the present debate over the appointment of a strongly partisan membership of the ELECAM board? Our thesis is that it is a deliberate ploy to shift the debate from the real issue which is ELECAM’s inherent incapability of organising a credible election!
Had Paul Biya fulfilled the requirement of the law there would inevitably have been full public focus on the integrity of the new election management organ. At its very best ELECAM cannot fulfil the aspirations of Cameroonians in organising free and fair elections. ELECAM does not, as has been much expected, represent an improvement in electoral management in Cameroon. It is not independent.
This is the debate that Paul Biya cleverly avoided because it directly questions his political will which exposes and hurts him. We believe he will sometime when the debate would have subsided review his appointments and give the impression that he has responded to the legitimate complaints of Cameroonians. Typical Biya, he will then use that to score political marks in his favour.
All-powerful GM
At that time the public will also praise him for having done the right thing. In the process little attention, if any, would anymore be paid to ELECAM’s ability to do the job. This newspaper has dwelt at length in the past on the issue.
The essential thing is that the board, even granted the neutrality and personal integrity of its members, is powerless and functions only and exclusively on the directives of ELECAM’s general manager who is not only the administrative and financial head but also, and critically, is fully endowed with competence on electoral questions.
In practice a board member who uncovers a fraud on the field, for example, cannot decide on what to do to check the problem. He must first clear with his GM and get his go-ahead. If not he is helpless.
For all his power ELECAM’s GM is not (surprisingly) required to be politically neutral or be a man of personal integrity like board members. That means that the president can appoint a CPDM member and wouldn’t have violated the law.
The ELECAM law also empowers the GM to summon, if he chooses, the army of DOs to help in any field operations that he deems fit. Moreover the law obliges him to render account almost minute by minute to the MINATD minister, the very evil behind previous elections. He is also obliged to provide any information demanded by the minister!
The MINATD minister is so present in the functioning of the GM that no one conscious of his strong pro-government posture is left in any doubt about his influence in the conduct of future elections. It would have been more reassuring had the new organ been made to be totally distant and separate from MINATD. That link does not encourage trust in the new organ and hardly supports any talk of ELECAM being independent. It is not and cannot be.
By the time the present debate on faulty membership would have ended the bigger and more important debate on the structure and inherent inability of ELECAM to organise free and fair elections would have been overlooked, to Biya’s greater glory.
He could then summon the courage to tell his partners that there is an improvement in the electoral system in Cameroon! He already said that in his New Year’s address to the nation by referring to the strengthening of the electoral system with the putting in place of ELECAM! When he would have revised the board list, be sure, it will be time to climb to rooftops and tell the world of electoral progress in Cameroon.
Yet ELECAM is at best only a counterfeit of the independent organ Biya once promised and got support from the Commonwealth to create. Having reneged on it, the president now looks for a clever way of getting Cameroonians endorse his fake version.
The way the false debate is raging already provides some clue to Biya’s success. Good luck for him.
Source: The Herald
Posts
=================
No comments:
Post a Comment