President Paul Biya has set Cameroon's first regional elections on Monday for December 6, especially in English-speaking areas in the throes of a bloody separatist conflict, but the ballot is rejected as it stands by a large part of the opposition who hears the boycott.
This indirect ballot in the ten Cameroonian regions should allow the establishment of regional councils provided for in the 1996 constitution to promote decentralization but never elected until today.
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These councils, in the two English-speaking regions of the North-West and the South-West, should also be endowed with a special status promised in October 2019 by Paul Biya, 87 years old and in unchallenged power for nearly 38 years, at the 'resulting from a national dialogue to try to put an end to the fighting between separatists and security forces.
"The electoral colleges are convened (...) on Sunday, December 6, 2020, for the purpose of electing regional advisers,"
reads a presidential decree by Paul Biya issued on Monday.
Grand voters will have to elect 90 regional councilors, including 20 representatives of traditional chiefdoms.
The regional councils are endowed with limited powers in non-sovereign areas such as equipment, regional planning and culture.
The two main opposition parties had warned, long before Monday's announcement, that they would boycott the regional ones, in particular as long as the bloody conflict in the two regions housing most of Cameroon's English-speaking minority was not resolved.
In these areas, Anglophone armed groups demanding independence are fighting the security forces deployed massively by the regime of Paul Biya, dominated by the French-speaking majority.
The UN, international NGOs and some Western states regularly denounce crimes committed against civilians by both sides.
"We will not participate in the regional elections provided for in the current patterns",
warned on September 2 John Fru Ndi, president of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), one of the two main opposition parties which requires in particular beforehand
" a cease-fire ”
in the English-speaking zone.
Maurice Kamto, main opponent to Mr. Biya at the head of the Movement for the Renaissance of Cameroon (MRC), called on August 23 for the
"resolute peaceful resistance of the Cameroonian people against the electoral forfeiture in preparation and departure pure and simple by Mr. Paul Biya ”.
"No behavioral deviation will be tolerated,"
the Minister of Territorial Administration, Paul Atanga Nji, warned Monday evening, promising that the security of the ballot would be ensured.
