Murky voter registration mars election run-up

Apainyassi is Senegalese. Yet, he says he plans to cast a vote in The Gambia’s presidential elections later this month – in fact, he’s already been issued with a voter card.

Apainyassi, who doesn’t want to give his full name, says he feels a greater affinity for his adoptive home and sees no reason why he shouldn’t vote in the election.

“This is where I work, and this is where I live now,” he said, pointing at the tiny village of Janackquel, one kilometre within Gambian territory, but just over the border with Senegal’s restive southern Casamance region.

Across The Gambia, campaign stickers and posters encourage voters to choose the incumbent President Yahya Jammeh of the ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) in polls set for the 22 September. Their campaign slogan: “operation no compromise”.

Opposition candidates say that the APRC are so determined to ensure their man will win, that they are sending “mobilisers” to southern Gambia to register non-nationals like Apainyassi because they will vote for President Jammeh based on ethnic allegiances.

Jammeh won the last election in 2001 with a slim majority, meaning additional names could make a big impact.

Apainyassi openly agrees that he will put his mark against President Jammeh, because he is a member of the same Jolla ethnic group, or Diola, as it is known in Senegal.

Alhagie Mustapha Carayol, Chairman of The Gambia’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), told IRIN that over 94,000 new voters have registered to cast a vote in this year’s presidential election.

Denial

Sam Sarr, a representative of the New Alliance for Democracy and Development (NADD) party, has accused President Jammeh party of handing out voter cards to members of his own Jolla ethnic group, even if they are not Gambian nationals.

Ousainu Darboe, leader of the United Democratic Party (UDP), the main opposition party has previously echoed these complaints in interviews with IRIN.

They say that Jammeh needs to bring in support from outside because the Jolla are a minority in Mandinka-dominated Gambia.

The ruling party APSC spokesman Yankuba Touray, who is also Secretary of State for Agriculture, declined to speak to IRIN about the opposition’s accusations. He has previously told IRIN he was not aware of any impropriety over the issuing of voter cards.

But Moussa Diatta, a Senegalese national from Casamance, and a Jolla, who IRIN met in The Gambia’s second largest city Serakunda, confirmed he was recruited by a pro-Jammeh group working in Casamance.

“There are supporting committees that work in many villages in Casamance for the re-election of Jammeh. The members of the committee come to the village on the eve of the elections by bus. Then after they have voted, they are taken back to their villages,” he said.

Diatta said he received Gambian identity cards for himself and his family that lets them vote and live legally in The Gambia.

At Oulampane, another village in northern Casamance that IRIN visited, photos of The Gambia’s president and APSC campaign posters are plastered on every available space on the crumbling walls.

The village chief Gnantouma Bodian explained that villagers there have become so intertwined with The Gambia that most consider themselves Gambian in all but nationality.

“All the children in the zone were born in Gambian health facilities. Their mothers could not find suitable facilities here in Casamance so they went to The Gambia for the birth. Afterwards, the children were certified there,” he said.

Although many of Oulampane’s children live in their village on the Senegalese side, many attend school on the Gambian side of the border.

No challenge

Carayol at the Gambian Electoral Commission denies that there has been any impropriety in the way the voting lists were drawn up. “None of the opposition parties has ever made a formal challenge to the lists, so there cannot be any problem,” he said.

However, representatives from the two main opposition parties NADD and UPC contacted by IRIN said making a complaint is impossibly complicated and expensive. They said each illegal voter must first be identified and then recorded with the IEC, which costs 25 dalasis (90 cents) per name.

Sarr at the NADD party said, “it would run to tens of thousands of dalasis with the number of people we believe were illegally registered, and we could not possibly afford it.”

The violator must then be served with a summons, which opposition parties say has in the past proved impossible even in Banjul, where there are some street names.

Many villages in Casamance and The Gambia do not even appear on maps, and are divided into undistinguishable compounds housing up to eight families at once.

Vitalie Muntean, the UN’s Deputy Resident Representative in The Gambia said the confusion could be avoided if in future a continuous registration process was used as in most other democracies.

“If it is not a process that just happens once every five years, that makes things much more transparent, and also does not add too much work to the IEC,” Muntean said. “The system here in The Gambia needs to be looked into and things done to improve it.”

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