NAIROBI, Nov 13 (AFP) - The fiasco surrounding the US presidential election has undermined the United States' role as the standard against which all other democracies should be judged, according to African newspaper columnists. The foreign editor of Kenya's Daily Nation, Henry Owuor, predicted that the Florida recount debacle would stain the international reputation of the United States. "Former president Jimmy Carter knows what this means -- his Atlanta-based Carter Foundation will think twice before sending him (again) out to Africa to preside over elections. "Even the foundations run by the two top parties will henceforth be frowned upon in the same capitals (where) they once lectured election officials on the fairness of elections," wrote Owuor. "For Africa, the losers are the pro-democracy campaigners who used the US as an example of a just society. The victors are the dictators who are under pressure to improve their human rights records. Already, Zimbabwe's (President) Robert Mugabe has ... expressed his delight at the goings-on in Florida." The fact that the president is selected not on the basis of the overall popular vote but by the all-or-nothing electoral college system, which determines the president on a state-by-state basis, has raised a few eyebrows. Lucy Oriang', jumping the gun in Nairobi's Daily Nation on Tuesday, confessed to being "confounded by the fact that the man who won the popular vote ended up a loser in a country that purports to uphold democracy, in other words, the people's will. "But there is something vaguely familiar about the distorted logic of the electoral college. Most African countries are, after all, ruled by men who came to power with minority votes, or simply rigged their way in," mused Oriang'. Charles Onyango-Obbo, editor of Uganda's Monitor but writing in the Nation, sarcastically declared himself surprised that "Americans can go the Moon and land a probe on Mars, but can't steal an election." John Kitongo, head of the Kenyan branch of Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, picked up the theme in the East African, published in Kampala and one of the most respected newpapers in the region. "What do Americans know about elections?" he asked, going on to imagine an ironic scenario with the US polls being organised as they are in Africa, with African observers monitoring them and the CIA and FBI closely involved in their organisation. "Opposition leaders would cry foul and the top leadership of the incumbent party would issue their own statement accusing the opposition of trying to rig the polls. ... "Anxiety levels would reach a high enough pitch to force some people to rush out to supermarkets to stock up on non-perishables." The African monitors, Githongo imagined, would eventually declare that the election "saw its fair share of ballot stuffing, head-cracking, bribery and the like, but in the grand scheme of things, when all is said and done, (say) it generally represented the democratic will of the people." This was a jibe at the attitude of the election monitoring industry, which in the past has shown a tendency on this continent to declare given polls acceptable "by African standards." Githongo was also drawing a direct comparison with elections in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous state of Tanzania, held on October 29 and November 5 and widely discredited by the opposition and international election observers, some of them from ... the United States. afm/gd _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask] if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------