By Demba Ali Jawo
Listening to the newly appointed chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), Mr Joe Colley during a recent appearance on Coffee Time with Peter Gomez on West Coast Radio, it appears that the Commission is still not yet ready for a prime time show.
While there is no question about Mr Colley’s wealth of experience with regard to electoral matters, but from the gist of what he said or failed to say during the programme, it seems that the IEC is still not quite yet ready to embrace electoral reforms but rather to carry on with business as usual. Even though the top leadership has changed, but the Commission’s modus operandi seems to remain the same.
While everyone had expected some significant changes in the commission’s mode of operations after the departure of its octogenarian head, Alieu Momar Njai, from what we have seen or heard from Chairman Colley, not much is expected to change. For instance, he never mentioned any plans to deal with some of the most urgent things that everyone had expected the IEC to deal with. One of those things include the urgent need to re-demarcate the electoral boundaries which are currently quite demographically unequal. For instance, the biggest constituency (Serekunda West), with a voter population of more than 50,000 is more than 20 times bigger than the smallest one, which is Janjanbureh, which has a voter population of less than 2000. Yet despite that vast demographic difference, both constituencies are supposed to be represented by one person in the National Assembly, with exactly the same legislative powers and privileges. By all accounts, therefore, this is one of the biggest flaws of our democracy because it tantamount to the votes of the people of Janjanbureh being worth twenty times more than those of Serekunda West, which is a mockery of democracy and equal representation.
By implication, Mr Colley also tried to justify the continuous use of the outdated marble system of voting, describing it as rig-proof. He however went on to express the fear that if the number of presidential candidates were to be about 20 or more, the IEC would be faced with the logistical problem of where to put all those ballot drums. That admission alone is an indication of the serious limitation to the continuous use of the marble, because unlike the paper ballot where all candidates can share one ballot box in any polling booth, in the case of the marble system, each candidate would require one drum in a polling booth. One can therefore imagine the logistical nightmare the IEC would be faced with if a large number of candidates were to contest the elections with such an outdated system.
Similarly, can anyone imagine, as an example, the fate of an unsophisticated old woman getting into that polling booth and trying to locate her preferred candidate amongst the more than 20 ballot drums crammed in a little room? It is certainly going to be a nightmare for many voters and it could result in many “spoilt” ballots with some people simply placing their marbles anywhere else they could.
It is indeed quite hard to understand why the IEC should continue to cling on to this outdated system when everyone else has modernised their electoral systems. It certainly does not make any common sense to assume that the whole world is wrong and the Gambia is right to continue with this archaic system. We can recall that the former Chairman Alieu Momar Njai had promised that the IEC had the intention of transitioning to paper ballot by the next elections cycle. One would therefore wonder why Mr Colley’s administration seems to have abandoned that idea and instead wants to continue with the outdated marble system.
Another issue that the IEC seems to be bent on maintaining is the holding of separate elections for the presidential, National Assembly and local government elections at different times. In a poor country like the Gambia, it certainly does not make much economic sense to continue to hold these three different elections separately when it would have cost the Gambian tax payers far less to hold all of them at the same time. There is also no doubt that holding them all at the same time would not only be more cost-effective, but it would also reduce the logistical nightmare that usually face the IEC because instead of spending millions of dalasis to recruit and train election staff every few months,the same people could be used to carry out the task.
Mr Colley also failed to talk about what plans, if any, the IEC had to extend the vote to Gambians in the diaspora. However, even if that were to happen, how practical would it be for the Commission to carry iron drums and bags full of marbles around the world to enable Gambians to cast their ballots?
It is certainly time that the IEC re-invented itself by embracing modernity rather than sticking on to the old and outdated system.
