Appointment of ELECAM members: Biya, Inoni undertake farcical consultations

Like on previous occasions Paul Biya uses other means to arrive at his list but orders a public show of consultations to give the impression that the list that will come out in the end resulted from the democratic exercise

By Ojong Steven Ayuk, The Herald

In the exercise of his overwhelming powers, President Paul Biya often tries to give the impression of a democratic approach in a deliberate effort to impress the public and particularly Cameroon’s foreign partners.

Under the president’s directives Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister, has receiving leaders of the five parties in parliament in what the public media say are consultations in view of appointing members of the election management organ, ELECAM.
This time the number of political leaders is limited to the parties in the Assembly but on previous occasions it was much wider.
What really happens is that President Biya puts together his list all alone, and then tells the prime minister to undertake consultations at which political leaders are asked to propose names.
Even when they are asked to propose a party member to represent the party on the organ, Paul Biya is absolutist and is never bound by such a suggestion.

In the end the list ends up with someone representing their party on the organ who was not in fact the choice of the leader. It is a method that Biya has often used to create conflict between the appointee and his party leadership which ends in creating some allegiance to the President.

One of the most farcical public consultations undertaken by the government recently was in December 2006 over the creation of ELECAM. For about two weeks all the major political and social and economic forces from all over Cameroon were summoned to Yaounde to meet the prime minister on a one-and-one basis.
They were assured that the president was about to create an independent elections management organ. The consultations were therefore intended to seek the views of each political actor to facilitate the finalization of a bill to that effect.

What was sent to parliament in the end was a far cry from an independent election organ. What was even worse was that the new organ named Elections Cameroon (ELECAM) was even not even to be immediately operational. It was to be progressively rendered
functional over a period of eighteen months. The end result of the exercise was that the legislative election of 2007 was to be organized once more by the detested Minister of Territorial
Administration. Opposition forces cried fowl, betrayal and lacked adjectives to qualify the president’s cavalier and high handed manner.