• by Fulgence Zamblé (abidjan)
• Tuesday, January 12, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Preparations for presidential elections scheduled for the end of February or the beginning of March - elections which have already been postponed numerous times since 2005 - have again reached an impasse in Côte d'Ivoire.

The Ivorian presidency and the Independent Electoral Commission are at loggerheads over the verification and finalising of the electoral list.

In a television broadcast on Saturday, Jan. 9, spokesperson for the presidency Gervais Coulibaly accused the head of the electoral commission, Robert Beugré Mambé, of having allowed as many as 429,000 illegitimate voter registrations.

Two days later, President Laurent Gbagbo's party, the Front populaire ivorian, called for the Mambé's resignation. (Mambé is a member of the opposition Democratic Party of Ivory Coast, known by its French acronym PDCI.)

The accusation of fraud was rejected by the IEC in a communiqué published the same day. 'The president of the IEC has not, at any time, taken any action leading to the registration of people who were not subject to the correct verification procedures,' wrote the commission.

On behalf of the Rassemblement des houphouëtistes pour la démocratie et la paix, a loose alliance of four leading opposition parties, Alphonse Diédié Mady of the PDCI, asserted that the affair was 'a delaying tactic of the (ruling) Front populaire ivorianI. This demonstrates a desire in the president's camp not to go to the polls'.

The alliance said it is considering calling for protests.

'It is too bad that a fresh crisis has appeared at this time,' says political observer Maurice Zagol. He says recent events dash fresh hope for the elections as the new year began, pointing to positive statements from several politicians at the end of 2009, and the drafting of plan for disarmament and demobilisation of former rebels in four cities across the country.

In 2002, Côte d'Ivoire was divided in two by an armed rebellion aimed at ending the perceived marginalisation of people from the north of the country. After several false starts, a peace accord brought that conflict to an end in March 2007.

Five thousand of former rebel combatants are to be integrated into a future army, and 400 commissioned and non-commissioned officers who joined the rebellion will see their ranks brought up to par with their comrades who remained in the army loyal to the government during the civil war.

The finalisation of the hotly-contested electoral list was meant to be concluded on Jan. 6, but it was postponed following two weeks of strikes by administrative clerks in December. The clerks' demanded payment of several months of arrears on their salaries before resuming work, which crucially includes the issuing of documents needed for people applying to be added to the voters' list. Of six million potential voters, around four million registrations were retained without question. Nearly two million were rejected - no records for a quarter of these people were found in any of the national records used for verification.

'My name's on the provisional electronic list. But when a hard copy of the list was posted, my registration didn't appear,' says Madeleine Bougouhi, a resident of the Yopougon neighbourhood in Abidjan's northeast. 'I'm still waiting to get my case looked at.' Moussa Bakayoko says that his name was omitted for unknown reasons. 'My whole family is on the electoral list and i am the only one whose name is missing,' he said, while acknowledging that he had changed his birth certificate to reduce his age.

Bakayoko's modified documents illustrate one of the underlying problems.

'These cases are now the biggest part of the problem confronting the process of verifying the electoral list. There are duplicate records. People had to do it (modify their documents) - whether to find a job, using the birth certificate of a younger sibling, whether deciding to reduce their age in order to work longer in the civil service,' explains Donatien Kacou, IEC agent.

All the ingredients are now in place for the elections to be postponed again, Zagol told IPS. 'There is now an obvious loss of confidence between the different parties and it seems unlikely this breach can be easily plugged, without major upheavals at the heart of the agency organising the elections as the president's camp wishes.'

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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