D.A., thanks for this piece.  It is quite clear to all that the IEC is
bought and paid for by the APRC.   Thus, they should not be expected to
enfranchise Gambians abroad for obvious reasons.  The Alternative should be
ready to do battle with the APRC, IEC, and the Justice System, since they
all work in unison in their effort to steal elections.  They cannot fall
asleep like the last time and then cry foul after the fact.  The Alternative
will not be forgiven by Gambians if they sleep at the switch, this time
around.  However, we on the outside need to step up to the plate and not
just stop at lip service.  So, the ball is in our court.  Please read on.


IEC Raises Hopes of Diaspora Gambians But -

The Independent (Banjul)

March 22, 2004
Posted to the web March 26, 2004

D.a. Jawo
Banjul

'To See What is Right And Do It is Want of Courage'- Confucius

There is no doubt that most Gambians in the Diaspora were happy to hear the
Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) announce that they were exploring the
possibilities of extending the franchise to them.


That indeed would be a positive element in our democratisation process,
which no doubt would go quite a long way in bringing us at par with our
neighbours. One would however cannot help but wonder why it has taken this
long for the IEC to start such a process. If a country like Guinea Bissau,
with less developed facilities than The Gambia can afford to extend such a
facility to its citizens living in this country and in other countries as
well, it is hard to understand why our people living outside this country
could not still participate in our electoral process.

There is absolutely no doubt that to implement such a scheme would require
quite a lot of planning and logistics. It is a well known fact that the
thousands of Gambians in the Diaspora are quite scattered all over the world
and it would not be quite easy to mobilise them to cat their votes,
particularly with our peculiar electoral system which requires voters to
physically drop marbles into a box.

While that is almost an impossible system to implement abroad, but there is
no reason why a more practical method cannot be devised in order to help
enfranchise the thousands of Gambians living outside this country but who
also have a stake in its development. If indeed the IEC has not got the
resources and the means to reach everyone of them, then they should at least
start from somewhere. It is a well-known fact that there is a relatively
larger concentration of Gambians in certain countries such as Senegal,
United States and the United Kingdom and may be the IEC should start the
process in those countries, at least on a pilot scheme to see how it would
work.

Indeed, while all these plans are going on, there are some people who are
quite skeptical about the will, particularly on the part of the regime to
see this scheme succeed. There are clear indications that a majority of
those living abroad tend to sympathise with the opposition and if given the
chance, they are likely to vote for the opposition rather than the APRC.
This fact is quite well known to the regime and for that reason alone, they
are not ever likely to help facilitate the process of extending the vote to
those in the Diaspora.

In view of such a possible scenario therefore, the very fact that the task
force put in place by the IEC to look into that possibility comprises
entirely of representatives of government institutions, the chances of the
scheme being implemented are quite slim. It would have been expected that as
the most important stakeholders, the political parties and other civil
society organisations should have been included in the process rather than
leaving it all to the government institutions. It has even made some people
to express the suspicion that the IEC just wanted to use that as an easy
escape route because they are almost fully convinced that the government
would never facilitate its implementation.

At the same press briefing that the IEC disclosed their intention to
enfranchise the Gambians in the Diaspora, they also vehemently rebutted
allegations of biasness in favour of the ruling party. I however wonder
whether they were able to give a satisfactory justification for the decision
of their chairman Gabriel Roberts to apparently succumb to pressure from the
APRC a few minutes before the commencement of the last presidential
elections to allow people with voters' cards but whose names were not on the
voters' list to vote. That decision was indeed very suspicious considering
the allegations that registration of voters was going on well after the end
of the official registration period.

Indeed even the IEC at one time acknowledged that they conducted some
registration at some military barracks after the end of the official
registration exercise. That was certainly incompatible with the independence
and impartibility of the IEC.

Another area of contention, which was touched by James Abraham during the
press briefing, was the relationship between the IEC and the media.

While everyone expects the IEC to have its own media guidelines during
elections, but no one expects them to interfere with the legitimate rights
of journalists to report on issues of public interest. That was what seems
to have happened during the last presidential elections. A good case in
point was the harassment by the police of Baboucarr Gaye, the proprietor of
Citizen FM when he decided to announce the results of the elections directly
from the counting centres, which apparently was in contravention of the
directive given by the then Secretary of State for the Interior Ousman
Badjie that no one should announce the results before the chairman of the
IEC.

Indeed any journalist worthy of his/her salt should have ignored such a
directive because in the first place, it should not have been issued by
Ousman Badjie as he was not in charge of the elections but the IEC. It also
did not make sense as those results were already certified and verified by
all the representatives of the various political parties and the election
observers present at the country centres. Therefore unless if Mr. Badjie had
an ulterior motive for doing something else with the results, there was no
basis to prevent those results from being reported by journalist. It was
indeed a shame on the pat of the IEC that Mr.

Badjie has to order the police to close down citizen FM, apparently with the
connivance of the IEC. That was quite a clear indication that the government
never left the conduct of the elections entirely to the IEC.

We hope and pray that the media expert coming from the Commonwealth would
help the IEC to correct some of those anomalies.

It is for instance quite the norm in all the countries in the sub-region,
including Guinea Bissau for journalist to report the results directly from
the polling stations. It is therefore quite hard to see why it should not be
the case in this country. Everyone therefore experts the IEC to henceforth
take full charge of the entire electoral process and not to allow any other
person or institution to poke their partisan noses into the process.

Two other issues that the IEC cannot afford to ignore any longer are the
urgent need to re-demarcate the constituencies and to adopt the counting of
votes at the polling stations.

Relevant Links

West Africa
Gambia



It certainly does not make any sense to anyone with even the most
rudimentary democratic credentials that this country should continue to
maintain constituencies with such demographic disparities. How can anyone
justify giving equal weight to the views of the representative of
Janjanbureh for example with a voter population of less than 2000 to that of
Kombo North with more than 43, 000 voters? There is absolutely no
discernible reason for the continuous existence for such a system except may
be to entrench the gerrymandering tactics of the APRC regime as well as the
apparent weakness of the IEC to do the correct thing.

It is indeed a shame that while we are fastly approaching the next
elections, the IEC seems to be treating the issue as a non-event. There is
no way that the IEC commissioners can justify their continuous occupation of
their positions if they fail to address these pertinent issues.

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