(Picture: Trevor Grundy)

 

 

By Trevor Grundy

Gambia could become “an absolute model democracy within West Africa” if it conducted all aspects of its democracy in the same way that its 2011 presidential election was run, according to a member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues, Edward Alexander Canfor-Dumas. Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 programme Excess Baggage on Saturday (December 3) after issuing an interim report about the election he told journalist John McCarthy that the Commonwealth Secretariat in London had been right to send a five-person team to Gambia to monitor an election many people said was rigged.

Asked McCarthy: “Going in there as a Commonwealth election monitor . . .in a way you’re just rubber stamping this effective dictatorship?”

Canfor-Dumas: “Well…no. I mean, there’s a fine line to draw between what’s simply criticising and edging the country towards greater freedom.  In fact, our report was very balanced because there are some things they did incredibly well and if they conducted the rest of their democracy at the level they conducted the election itself they would have an absolute model democracy within West Africa.”

He added: ”We saw an election that was absolutely exemplary and we were incredibly impressed with the integrity and diligence of the polling officials and the politeness of the police and the way the party agents scrutinized  everything. It could have been East Cheam ( a respectatble London suburb where Prince Philip and Prince Charles went to school as children) having an election, part from everyone was black and it was outside.”

The Commonwealth Experts Team was led by a former Nigerian Foreign Minister, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi  and it included apart from Canfor –Dumas, the President of the Commonwealth Journalists Association(CJA), Chris Cobb.
Canfor-Dumas, 54, told listeners that the Commonwealth team  carried out the monitoring exercise by talking to election officials, candidates and journalists. He said that many Gambian journalists have been persecuted over the years by President Jammeh who came to power after a military coup in 1994. The election monitors  travelled around the country which was described on Excess Baggage as “a giant sock,” 200 miles long and 30 miles wide.

Telling how the team set off on its monitoring exercise, Canfor-Dumas said: ”We’d been given a huge first aid kit, a brick of local currency, Commonwealth flack-jackets, a huge lists of dos and don’ts and how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in the local language and then told to get on with it. A local guide took us to 21 polling stations.”

Canfor-Dumas travelled to the end of Upper River to a place called Basse Santa Su where he stayed at what was once the Governor’s Lodge, now known as the Social Security Rest House. The respected author and screenwriter told McCarthy that many of the polling stations in Gambia were schools. He  described the way votes are cast.

“A room would be set up as the place where the booth was set up and there were three drums. They have an unique voting system in the Gambia where you vote with marbles because there’s a very high level of illiteracy and people cannot be assured of putting a cross on a piece of paper. So you have these drums which are like large wastepaper baskets with a lid which has a long tube and a hole in it and each drum is in the colours of the three main parties and there’s a picture of the candidate. A bloke comes up with a registration card, a little plastic card and they’d all been registered – which is another great feather in the cap for the Electoral Commission – and if their identity is proved (and in 99 percent of the cases it was) they’d be given a marble and they’d go into the booth and drop the marble into one of the three drums and as the marble drops it hits a bell to indicate to the presiding officer that the vote has been cast and the person comes out. One of the knock-ons from this is you’re not allowed to ride a bicycle within 500 metres of a polling station…”

Actuality was played of Canfor-Dumas at a polling station.

C-D: – ‘Is everything going smoothly?’

Gambian election official: – ‘Everything is going smoothly.’

C-D:  ‘Everyone very cheerful? ‘

Gambian election official: ‘We don’t have any problems.’

The radio programme included a mixture of bouquets and brickbats for President Yahya Abdul-Aziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh and his regime – brickbats which included a comment by Canfor-Dumas about the way Jammeh had altered the constitution to make it easier for him to retain power – how the country was an effective one party state backed by the army, police and young men and women who dressed in green shirts and baseball caps and who made their presence felt at election time.

After describing an incident where soldiers tried to detain the Commonwealth observers before a member of Jammeh’s ubiquitous secret police told them to go away, Canfor-Dumas said:  ”There is no freedom of expression in the Gambia except for 11 days that the Electoral Commission declared  was the campaign period.  So it meant that the opposition only had 11 days since 2006 (the date of the last election) to mount a campaign. Throughout the campaign we saw no sign whatsoever of any opposition, so it’s not surprising that they got so few votes.”

Jammeh was declared winner after  gaining 72 percent of the vote with  an 83 percent turn-out. Before leaving Gambia, the Commonwealth monitoring team wrote an Interim Report about the 2011 election.
A full report will be submitted to the Commonwealth Secretary General in two to three weeks time.

ENDS

The full composition of the Commonwealth Expert Team was:

Professor Bolaji Akinyemi (Chair)
Former Foreign Minister
Nigeria
Ms Cynthia Barrow-Giles
Academic
St Lucia

Mr Edward Alexander Canfor-Dumas
Conflict Management Consultant
United Kingdom

Mr Christopher Cobb
President, Commonwealth Journalists Association
Canada

Madam Sa-adatu Maida
Commissioner, Electoral Commission
Ghana