Activity on Cameroon’s social media space has intensified ahead of the October elections as users share footage of abuses and politicians tweet their every move in a bid to engage voters.

Nine candidates are contesting the October 7 poll, including President Paul Biya, who has ruled the country for 35 years and is hoping to be re-elected for a sixth time.

But this time, the 85-year-old broke with media tradition by announcing his candidacy on Twitter, a key indicator that social media is taking a central role in this year’s presidential election.

There is much greater potential in terms of reach than when their words are communicated through the written press or the radio.

‘Breaking with protocol’

During the last election in 2011, only a handful of candidates were using social media. Today, almost all of them have a dedicated team to ensure they are very much present online.

One of Biya’s main challengers is Joshua Osih, head of the opposition Social Democratic Front (SDF), who has taken to engaging with voters online.

When he came under fire for “unpresidential behaviour” after posting a picture of himself at the airport in Paris, he hit back immediately on Twitter, saying that was exactly the point.

“I want to break with protocol and everything to do with the myth around the presidency,” he wrote. “I want to be close to the people I rule and not shut up in a palace.”

Why social media?

For candidates, going online offers far greater exposure than traditional forms of campaigning, explains Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Without Borders, an NGO.

“There is much greater potential in terms of reach than when their words are communicated through the written press or the radio,” she said.

For Owono, this increased presence online is the result of a significantly higher rate of internet connectivity in Cameroon.

Figures released earlier this month by the ministry of postal and telecoms services show connectivity jumped from a mere 0.24 percent of the population in 2011 to 35 percent last year. “There has been a fall in the cost of internet access and network quality has also improved,” she said.

Risk of fake news?

Although the official launch of the election campaign is only due to start on Saturday, social media is already highlighting prominent topics, especially the security crisis in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions.

Blighted by armed conflict, the two regions have remained largely inaccessible to the media and NGOs but those involved in the fighting have used social media to expose purported human rights violations by the other side.

Since the conflict began at the end of 2017, footage of alleged abuses involving both anglophone separatists and Cameroonian soldiers have been doing the rounds almost every day on social media.

A military policeman with his head cut off, villages burnt by the army, and even scenes of torture: all these excesses caught on camera are used by both sides to try and discredit the enemy.

Faced with the surge of horrific footage spreading online, the government has called for calm, denouncing the “inappropriate use of the internet”.

Both the increase in hate speech and the proliferation of “fake news” are proving to be “a threat to our right to reliable information, above all in an election period,” said Communications Minister Tchiroma Bakary.

In July, the minister dismissed out of hand a video purportedly showing abuse by Cameroonian soldiers in the country’s Far North Region, where troops are deployed to root out Boko Haram jihadists.

Several weeks later, an investigation was opened and several soldiers were arrested. “The main challenge regarding the use of social networks is disinformation,” said Janvier Ngnoulaye, who heads an NGO called Internet Society Cameroon.

Will gov’t shutdown social media?

With less than three weeks until the vote, Biya’s supporters, who see him as best placed to handle the separatist crisis and the threat posed by Boko Haram, maintain that footage of alleged abuses by the army was put online in order to sabotage his re-election bid.

“It’s all about harming Biya’s image,” a security source told AFP. In fact, the campaign has sparked an online war of images: when one side posts pictures of roads in disrepair, the other responds with photos of huge construction projects, such as the motorway between Yaounde and Douala.

Earlier this month, a misleading rumour began circulating on social networks suggesting that Yaounde was going to shut down internet access during the vote, as happened in Mali in August.

“Fake news,” responded the communications minister. But such fears are not entirely unfounded. In early 2017, as the separatist protests multiplied in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions, Yaounde sought to stamp out the unrest by cutting off internet access in the two areas for over three months.

AFP

Campaigning for Cameroon’s October 7 presidential election officially begun Saturday. Opposition parties have failed to agree on a single candidate to face incumbent President Paul Biya and are suspicious of each other as they maneuver to unseat the man who has ruled Cameroon since for more than three and a half decades.

Thousands of people march through the streets of the northern Cameroon town of Garoua, singing and pledging their support for Paul Biya as campaigns for the October 7 presidential election begin. The people are from the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM), and 20 other political parties whose leaders, last July, announced that they had endorsed the candidacy of Biya and had asked their supporters to vote for him.

The National Salvation Front party of Cameroon’s communication minister, Issa Tchiroma, is one of the parties that stands strong in support of Biya. Tchiroma says Biya is the only one seen as protecting Cameroon’s interest.

He says people are against Paul Biya and criticize him daily or attack his policies simply because he has been protecting the country’s riches from foreign predators. He says people are offering their unconditional support to Biya because he has pledged that as long as he lives and as long as he has the support of the Cameroonian people, he will protect all natural resources and riches for future generations.

Tchiroma spent 6 years in prison after he was arrested on 16 April 1984 for involvement in a coup attempt against Biya. When he regained freedom in 1990, he campaigned against Biya, but surprisingly Biya appointed him minister of transport in 1992 in what was viewed as a way of dividing and weakening the opposition.

Since then, the country’s opposition has remained fractured, with eight candidates running against Biya in the presidential poll.

Serge Espoire Matomba, candidate of the P.U.R.S. party, says even though campaigning has started, he still hopes, in talking with other contenders, the opposition will agree on a single candidate.

“I speak with Professor Maurice Kamto, I speak with Akere Muna, I speak with Osih Joshua, I speak with Cabral Libi. That means we are still working on it.”

Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement party says he will not agree to surrender his candidacy to someone else.

“Why should I abandon my candidacy and line up behind another one, no. I am a leader of a political party, I am not standing on my own.”

Twenty-eight candidates filed to compete in the presidential election. Cameroon’s elections management body ELECAM accepted nine, including Biya’s candidacy.

Party leaders have traded blame for their failure to unite.

The main opposition candidate Joshua Osih says he suspects some of the candidates are sponsored by Biya to keep the opposition fractured.

The 85-year-old Biya, who has led the central African country since 1982, is favored to win another seven-year term. That would take his rule 2025.

Culled from the VOA

Armed separatists in the Anglophone northwest and neigboring southwest regions have vowed they will not allow a “foreign election.”

Paul Biya, Cameroon’s president since 1982, is seeking re-election. Vying to oust the 85-year-old leader are eight candidates representing a string of opposition parties. The election campaigning starts nationwide on Saturday.

The incumbent himself is not expected to show up in the Anglophone regions, where only one candidate has ventured in the run-up to the vote and the escalating conflict has prompted an exodus of people – including voters.

Nearly 400 people have been reported killed since long-running tensions turned violent in October 2017 and separatists declared self-rule in the region they call Ambazonia.

At the Mile 17 Motor Park in Buea, region’s capital, the governor of the region, Bernard Okalia Bilai, is pleading with hundreds of commuters to go back to their homes. “There is fake news that the army will launch an attack. No, the army is not launching attacks. The army is there to protect the population and their property and the army is there to neutralize those attacks,” Bilai says.

Samuel Ikome Sako, was named interim president of the self-declared Ambazonian republic at the beginning of 2018

Thousands have left

“Those who are abandoning their homes, you can see here, the luggage, we have beds, furniture. No, where are they going? No, we want them to stay at home.”

Bilai has been visiting the park almost daily to try and stop the exodus of residents from the worst-affected regions.

Teacher John Nlom, who is leaving with his wife and five children, says he does not trust the governor’s assurances that their security is guaranteed.

“The governor himself, who is saying that people should stay back, that they are protected, is moving around with soldiers protecting him. Will the soldiers protect all the people? That is the reason I cannot stay. I have to leave,” Nlom says.

Over the past three weeks, thousands of residents have packed up and left, according to authorities. They don’t care much about voting in an election that won’t be free and fair, says Prince Ekosso, president of the United Socialist Democratic Party (USDP).

Credible elections “impossible”

“It is impossible for credible elections to take place in the northwest and the southwest. As a matter of fact, the towns and cities of the northwest and the southwest have been deserted,” Ekosso says.

“It’s already late now for anything to be done for free and fair elections to take place in the two regions.”

Presidential candidates across the country have been encouraging voters to cast their ballots on October 7. Prophet Frank Ndifor Afanui, a candidate for the opposition Cameroon National Citizenship Movement, is the only one to travel to the southwest region so far, with a visit to Mutengene.

In Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, opposition Cameroon Renaissance Movement (MRC) candidate Maurice Kamto suggests the separatists should allow people to vote as the only way to change the system they have been fighting.

“They will not win the war, so why continue fighting that war? Is it a solution for a country in crisis just to split into two parts just because we have may be a government which is not listening to them? Go and vote because it is the only solution. We do not have to sacrifice our people,” Kamto says.

The crisis in Cameroon’s anglophone regions has put President Biya on shaky ground

Ballots on the way

Social Democratic Front (SDF) candidate Joshua Osih says he sees a solution to the conflict.

“The problem is not the secession. The problem is the marginalization and injustices that lead to that secession. The secession will not necessarily solve that problem,” says Osih.

“When you have a president of the republic who understands these issues, the first thing that has to happen is to solve the problem of marginalization. I have absolutely no problem that as soon as I am elected, one of the first decisions I take is to recognize that it is a political problem.”

Cameroon’s election commission, ELECAM, has been meeting with political parties to find out what can be done for elections to take place peacefully in the sub-regions. Its board chair, Enow Abrams Egbe, says that although voters are leaving the areas, the commission will ensure an election is held for those who remain.

“In terms of security measures, after much discussion with our partners on the ground, we felt that it was necessary to regroup the polling stations into polling centers and a lot of considerations were taken,” Egbe says.

“There are two levels of distribution of material. The first material we call light electoral materials, I can say almost 100 percent are already on the ground. The heavy material concerning ballot papers and campaign materials are already on the way.”

The European Union routinely monitors elections in Africa

EU observers won’t be there

Many Cameroonians believe the election is merely a charade to rubberstamp the Biya’s stay in power. The government in Yaounde says more than 100 countries and institutions have applied to send election observers, but it is not known which have been accredited.

The European Union will not deploy observers to Cameroon for the election, as it has with all polls since the country adopted a multi-party system in 1990.

“Election observation has not been scheduled or prepared. But of course we are watching what happens,” says Hans-Peter Schadek, the head of the EU delegation in Cameroon. The 28-member bloc, Schadek says, is working with civil society in Cameroon – and in particular, a non-governmental initiative to promote more participation of women in politics.

Emile Bindzi, a spokesman for Universe party candidate Cabral Libii says the EU’s failure to send election observers “raises a lot of questions in Cameroonian society.” There are some who believe that the EU would like to leave Cameroonians to their sad fate.

Culled from Deutsch Welle