Some seven US ex-Congressmen who passed for observers of the October 11 presidential election in Cameroon have been accused of receiving bribes to the colossal sum of 400.000 US dollars to authenticate the polls in the face of the international community.

Cameroon is a country located on the West of the African continent. It has a population of over 16 million (approximate because the last census in the country took place in 1987 and at that time the population stood at 14 million). Major industries in Cameroon include Brasseries du Cameroun, a French brewery that anufactures assorted beer, Cimencam, a cement manufacturing industry, SODOCOTON, a cotton industry, and SONARA, an oil refinery company.

Cameroon was colonised by the English and France. It is a bilingual country with bicultural structures, Francophone and Anglophone, though this not respected by the regime in place. The post colonial period saw the French maintaining their foothold in Cameroon even after the English had left. They still influence the rule in Cameroon till today. French president, Jacques Chirac had to send a message of congratulations to incumbent Mr. Paul Biya shortly after polling when final results had not even been declared.

The country’s major trading partners are France, America, Japan, and most recently China which is making inroads into Africa. It also has minor trading links with a few neighbouring countries like Nigeria, Chad Gabon and the Central African Republic.

Cameroon experiences both internal and external conflicts. Since the reunification of the independent states of La Republique du Cameroun and Southern Cameroons, colonised respectively by France and Britain, both states have been in bitter conflict. The latter have been marginalised by the former. The result was a movement called the Southern Cameroons National Council, SCNC, which is fighting for the staehood of the Anglophone part of the country. Since independence and reunification in the early 60s, no Anglophone has ruled Cameroon. The former Southern Cameroons state is the petrol area of the country, but has some of the worst development structures of the nation.

Cameroon counts over 250 ethnic groups, spread all over the country. For this reason, ethnicity is rife in the country, with the tribe of the leaders of the ruling party dominant in every major field.

It is against this backdrop that international observers came to monitor elections in the country, amongst them some seven American ex-Senators who were accused of being impartial. The accusation emerged from Cameroon’s frontline opposition Social Democratic Front, SDF. According to Mr. Nkemngu Martin, communication officer for the SDF, the so-called US observers were in Cameroon on a rescue mission. Referring to them as hungry con men, Nkemngu said their mission was to rescue “the ailing regime of incumbent president Paul Biya.

Mr. Biya has been glued to power since 1982 when his predecessor, late president Ahmadou Ahidjo, who was alleged to have been tricked into resigning, gave the presidency to him. This is said to be the reason why shortly after his resignation, Ahidjo waged a come-back coup d’etat in 1984, which was aborted.

Following the wind of change that swept across the African continent continent in the 90s, Mr. Biya was forced to introduce multiparty politics. This was marked by the forceful launching of the SDF party of NI John Fru Ndi in Bamenda. Deaths were recorded during the launching as a result of a clash between the population and armed security men of president Biya who saw multiparty democracy as “unripe” for his nation.

The first ever multiparty post-independence presidential election was held in 1992, a decade after Mr. Biya came to the helm of power. The opposition SDF claimed victory, which, according to its national leader, John Fru Ndi, was hijacked by the incumbent. Victory for the SDF was also confirmed by the US-based National Democratic Institute, NDI. But the Minstry of Territotial Administration, MINAT, which organised the election, connived with the Supreme Court to declare the final result in favour of incumbent president Paul Biya, allegedly being loyal to their boss.

Mr. Biya, in 1996, changed the constitution, moving the presidential mandate from five to seven years, a phenomenon which called for criticisms from several quarters.. This was followed by another presidential election in 1997 which the frontline opposition SDF boycotted, claiming that its organisation was tailored to give Mr. Biya victory. “Mr. Biya stood against himself and reaped another seven-year mandate, even though the results were not the usual 99.99 percent as was the case in the one party era”, said Prof Tazoacha Asonganyi, Secretary General of the SDF.

Meanwhile, in 1996, municipal and legislative elections were organised which theopposition declared were highly flawed. Mr. Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, CPDM, not only swept a majority of the seats in Parliament but also “seized” most of the councils supposedly won by the opposition.

After a very long waiting by Cameroonians, Mr. Biya finally announced the date for the 2004 presidential polls for October 11 from abroad. Having ruled Cameroon for 22 years, many Cameroonians, including militants of his CPDM party, thought he would decline due to the country’s economy that is said to have been plundered by corruption, thus inflicting misery to a greater percentage of the population under his regime. But Mr. Biya defied his party’s constitution of endorsing a candidate by announcing his candidature for the presidential polls, giving as reason the fact that Cameroonians both at home and in the diaspora wanted him for another seven-year mandate. CPDM militants had expected their party’s candidate to be democratically chosen in an extra-ordinary congress where challenges were expected.

One of the challengers was Mr. Mila Assoute, a CPDM Central Committe member who had created a progressive wing of the party, suffered a disappointment. Mila Assoute claimed Mr. Biya feared challenges irrespective of his “tales” being influenced by Cameroonians in and out of the country.

Prior to the October election, campaigns were unnoticed. As for the over 150 political parties in Cameroon, only a few could be seen in action. These included the Coalition for National Reconciliation and Reconstruction, CNRR, which was composed of Fru Ndi’s Social Democratic Front, Adamou Ndam Njoya’s Union for Democratic Change, UDC, Yondo Black Mandengue’s Mouvement Social pour la Nouvelle Democratie, MNSD, and members of some satellite parties who Fru Ndi said were hired by the Biya regime to distabilise the coalition. The coalition actually split when the alleged hired members declared Ndam Njoya single candidate of the coalition in contravention of the laid down procedures for the selection of such a candidate. Fru Ndi, who negotiated the coalition, withdrew from it to stand as candidate for his SDF party.

The CNRR had called for computerisation of the electoral process, the creation of an independent electoral commission and the use of transparent ballot boxes. Claiming that the computerisation exercise was expensive, the Biya administration rejected the idea outright. But Japan and Britain quickly offered to supply the transparent ballot boxes which were transported to Cameroon by Canada. ” IN place of the independent electoral commission, the government maintained the “toothless” National Electios Observatory, NEO, which it had created during the 1997 presidentials, though with some minute modifications”, further noted Mr. Nkemngu Martin.

Campaigns, however, heated up with the CPDM deploying the entire administration in the field where money was used as the major tool to convince the electorate. Activities in most government services were paralysed during the campaign period.

Another characteristic of the October polls was the multiplicity of candidates, most of whom were from satellite parties brought in to cause confusion within the coalition, as was held by SDF chairman Fru Ndi. MINATD retained 16 out of the 46 candidates that applied to run for president. Political pundits held that most of them wanted campaign funds to line their pockets and go to slumber since it was no hidden secret that they could not win a vote even in local councils. Effectively, only the CPDM, the SDF and the UDC criss-crossed the entire nation for campaigns, though the latter limited their campaigns to press conferences wherever they went. “Political lunatics and adventurers barely gathered a few neighbours for campaign rallies or organised motocycle parades in a few streets”, noted Bole Butake, a renowned university professor and a prolific playwright.

Polling on October 11 was fraught with lots of irregularities, according to Rtd Justice Nyoh Wakai, Founding father and campaign manager for the SDF. “Most people could not find their names on the electoral lists while opposition polling agents in most places were chased out of polling stations”, he maintained. Wakai further accused Divisional Officers and Sub Divisional Officers as sub organisers, of falsifying return sheets in favour of the incumbent Paul Biya. Other CPDM bigwigs were also accused of stuffing ballot boxes with ballot papers of the incumbent. This was the case of one time Cameroon’s Prime Minister, Achidi Achu who was molested in his home town by irate youths for attempting to stuff a ballot box.

After the work of the final vote counting committee, some 12 political party leaders filed complaints to the constitutional council for the “total cancellation of the election. But the Supreme Court sitting in for the Constitutional council has dropped more than half for reasons ranging from failure by the political leaders to sign to excuses that some of the leaders did not take part in the election. At the end of the examination of the complaints, it is very obvious that all such complaints would be dropped and Mr. Biya would declared winner.

The ink use to identify voters who had already cast their votes was not indelible, thus permitting thousands of people to vote several times. Surprisingly to public opinion, The US ex-Congressmen joined observers of La Francophonie shortly after the voting exercise to declare the polls free, fair and transparent, giving a lee way to MINATD to claim victory for incumbent president Biya before the proclamation of the final result. Such pronouncements were in contravention of the law which gives powers only to the Constitutional Council to proclaim the result of any presidential election.

The former US senators are said to have been contacted by the Cameroon government through a Washington-based public relations firm called Patten and Boggs who proposed the sum of 400.000 US dollars for the deal, an equivalent of Fcfa 200 million. According to a reliable source in Yaounde, Cameroon’ Prime Minister and head of government, Peter Mafany Musonge, negotiated the deal when he was in America to participate in the funeral of late US president, Ronald Reagan early this year. As condition for the deal, the seven men were expected to make positive comments about the election to give it international credibility.

Although the hired Congress men and La Francophonie observers held that the election was transparent, Commonwealth observers, led by former Canadian PM, Joe Clark, remarked that the polls were marred by massive irregularities. They spoke at a press conference they granted in Yaounde shortly before their departure for London on Friday October 15.

The US embassy in Cameroon did not comment whether the US government was aware of the presence of the seven men in the country. But Neils Marquardt, US Ambassador to Cameroon, had earlier expressed the wish to find the polls a new opportunity for Cameroon to turn a new page in its democratic process.

Jumkondah Francis Garriba is a journalist in Cameroon.

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