The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) had been in the news in the past few days, accused of involvement in alleged financial impropriety. This is certainly not doing any good to Commission’s reputation and credibility, which had been under the radar for quite a while now.
Obviously, the IEC needs serious revamping, both in terms of staffing and technical capacity before the next electoral cycle, which of course should include the replacement of its senile chairman, Alieu Momar Njai. While everyone commended Chairman Njai for the positive role that he played in the 2016 presidential elections which led to the defeat of former President Yahya Jammeh, but he seems to have overstayed his welcome.
Many people had pointed out that his term as chairman came to an end more than five years ago, but he had always succeeded in shifting the goalposts every time the issue is raised. However, as someone suggested, he certainly needs to call it a day before he soils the good name and reputation that he had earned over the period that he had occupied the position.
We now have barely two years to go before the commencement of the next electoral cycle, beginning with the presidential elections not later than December 2026, and yet, there is hardly any visible movement on the side of the IEC to indicate that they have taken adequate steps to conduct hitch-free elections when the time comes.
There are of course so many things that the Commission should do in order to effectively carry out their mandate. Apart from the need to update the electoral roll, we have also been promised a transition from the moribund marble system of voting to a paper ballot, which of course needs quite a lot of preparation. The very fact that the Gambia is still the only country in the whole wide world of more than 200 countries still using the outdated marble voting system in our elections seems to show our unwillingness to embrace modernity. It certainly does not make any sense to assume that we are right and everyone else is wrong.
With all those things that need to be done, it would be quite foolhardy for the Commission to wait until a few months before the elections before they would attempt to introduce such vital reforms.
Similarly, most people also expect adequate steps to be taken to ensure that the vote is extended to Gambians in the diaspora, and that also requires adequate preparations which include incorporating them in the electoral register.
Another area that the IEC must address before the next National Assembly elections, at least, is the demographic disparity of the electoral constituencies, with some of them more than 20 times larger than the others, and yet, they are all supposed to have equal representation in the legislature. For instance, a constituency like Janjanbureh presently has less than 2000 registered voters and all the five constituencies in Foni added together had slightly over 40,000 registered voters, while a constituency like Serekunda West, for instance, has almost 50, 000 registered voters, yet still, they are all expected to send one representative to the National Assembly. That certainly is a mockery of democracy and equal representation.
Therefore, it makes very little sense for the IEC to behave as if everything is under control. We certainly do not expect the commission to repeat the chaotic situations that ensured in the past due to their poor preparations for the elections.
