Letter to ELECAM President

Dear Dr. Fonkam;

Once more I congratulate you and your team for the steps towards improving our young democracy. During our last meeting on the need to implement the voters verification system we proposed last year, following your strong and firm recommendation for its immediate implementation, mindful of the fact that the implementation was later halted because of your agency’s excellent decision to recompile the electoral list;

We will like to come back to you to restate the following points and action points as we soon get into the full registration process:

There will be the need for the civil society to engage with ELECAM at multiple levels with focus on grassroots mobilization and civic education before, during and after the registration processes leading to and including the election day activities

Mr. President, you may agree with me that voters apathy is still high, citizenship trust and confidence in the processes still questionable and so together as Cameroonians we must find robust and innovative ways of reversing such positions towards a more citizen driven democratic process. 

Now that the biometric registration is soon going to start, with voters’ card not going to be delivered on the spot as hoped for, the voters’ verification system becomes even more relevant as an add-on layer of confidence building measures in our electoral system. As of now, we only hope that the card distribution will go hitch free, but there are always unforeseen circumstances, human or technical errors as well as carefully planed systems of sabotage.  

With the contract awarded, we are once again asking that we continue to work towards the implementation of the proposed system so that in the worst case, voters will know their polling stations, get their full voters information delivered directly to their mobile phones by them sending a simple SMS with their National identity card number to the short code 8001 which will be linked to the database in your office.

Based on the fact that this system will NOT require any financial engagement from ELECAM, it remain therefore an excellent opportunity to build voters confidence both in the electoral process and in your institution.

It will there be required that we work with any of your staffs to set-up and test the system pending the full registration process.