SDF Confronts NEO With Election Irregularities

By Chris Mbunwe

The Chairman of the SDF, John Fru Ndi, has served the President of the National Election observatory, NEO, Dr. Francois Xavier Mboyoum, with a three-page memo on irregularities the party has identified so far pertaining to the July elections.

The document says after the last SDF National Executive Committee, NEC, meeting, it was discovered that "very serious irregularities and illegalities abound nationwide, which, if not checked could mar the electoral process and render the exercise meaningless."

Fru Ndi insinuates in the memo that the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation, MINATD, has embarked on many irregularities and illegalities to facilitate election fraud at two levels in the election process.

At the preparatory stage, Fru Ndi says, MINATD is determined to use opaque ballot boxes in the pretext that it has not been able to acquire transparent ones for the additional polling stations. 

"These so-called additional polling stations are fake ones in which they intend to stuff the boxes with ballots of non-existent voters," Fru Ndi noted.The memo says while MINATD is preparing the grounds for multiple voting and heavy participation of ambulant voters, the electoral registers have been seriously tampered with through the permutation of names to facilitate multiple voting and reinsertion of new names unknown to the commission in charge of registration.

Another irregularity is that electoral registers have been posted only at the Divisional Offices making it difficult for all potential voters in the whole constituency to verify if their names are still on the register.  "This facilitates the elimination of names of the opposition voters as well as the stuffing of ballot boxes and the participation of ambulant voters," Fru Ndi remarks.

To facilitate ballot box stuffing, SDF points out that there is already the proliferation of polling stations in the same location, such as location A1, location 1B, location 1C and so on, when none of them has up to 500 voters.

Fru Ndi also intimates that the administration intends to continue giving observation passes into polling stations to many CPDM militants whereas these passes, as has been the case in the past, were given to all opposition parties.

The SDF argues that those to be appointed as chairpersons of polling station committees are going to be mostly CPDM militants.There will be the use of military and para-military personnel to intimidate voters to vote for the CPDM and arms will be introduced into polling stations, according to Fru Ndi. 

That apart, "the CPDM will recruit thugs to intimidate SDF and other opposition voters to vote for the CPDM."According to Fru Ndi, since Government has been announcing elections trends, this time around, "the SDF will be informing Cameroonians of the trend in the constituencies where it has field candidates and councils."

Fru Ndi appealed to NEO to "take pre-emptive measures and disprove to Cameroonians that you are not just an agent of the Ministry in this evil adventure, but an institution that will validly act for ELECAM, whose implementation your institution has replaced."

On how the party will fight electoral fraud, the SDF says it will implement all anti-rigging measures and resolutions of last NEC meeting to the letter, for example, ensuring that election riggers are treated like highway robbers.