Ivory Coast election result deadline is missed

Continue reading the main story

Related stories

• Cocoa: A mirror to Ivorian splits
• Will Ivorian party spirit end the coups?
• Ivorian election tour

Tension is high in Ivory Coast after a deadline was missed to publish the results of Sunday's election run-off.

The head of the electoral commission, Youssouf Bakoyoko, said it was still working to reach a consensus on the results, which have been disputed.

Supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo, and those of the opposition leader, Alassane Ouattara, have accused each other of trying to rig the poll.

The election is supposed to reunify a country divided since a 2002 civil war.

Some 8,000 UN peacekeepers are on alert in case the dispute leads to renewed conflict in the world's largest cocoa producer, which used to be seen as a haven of peace and prosperity in West Africa.

On Tuesday night, the president's representative at the electoral commission publicly tore up the first batch of results amid calls for votes from the former rebel-held north to be annulled. The region is where Mr Ouattara is most popular.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Whoever wins wins, whoever loses, loses - that's democracy”

Hamadoun ToureUN spokesman

Damana Adia Pickass said there had been an "electoral hold-up".

Mr Ouattara's allies have meanwhile accused the president of trying to block the announcement of the result because he has lost.

The main international observer missions do not support Mr Gbagbo's claims of widespread fraud in the north.

"The second round of the election took place, I would say, in a generally democratic climate," the UN spokesman in Ivory Coast, Hamadoun Toure, told the BBC.

The former colonial power France, the UN, EU and US have urged the Ivorian authorities to announce the results of Sunday's run-off.

Deserted streets

The BBC's John James in the main city Abidjan says the electoral commission includes representatives from both sides and they cannot agree, meaning the results cannot be announced.

Continue reading the main story

Presidential Contenders

Laurent Gbagbo (left)

• Age: 65
• Southerner, Christian
• Former history teacher, now president
• Took 38% of the first-round vote

Alassane Ouattara (right)

• Age: 68
• Northerner, Muslim
• Economist and former prime minister
• Took 32% of the first-round vote

• Country profile: Ivory Coast

The long delay has led to mounting tension. Banks have been closed and the streets in the commercial district were almost entirely deserted on Wednesday, our reporter says.

A presidential decree has extended the 1900-0600 curfew until Saturday.

One reliable source told the BBC the officials of the electoral commission had agreed on results from 13 of Ivory Coast's 19 regions, but that the remaining regions were being contested.

The head of the UN's peacekeeping mission, Young-jin Choi, is continuing to shuttle between the various camps and election commission to try to get the results published.

Mr Toure said the UN was disappointed that promises to publish the results quickly in the second round had been broken.

"Whoever wins, wins, whoever loses, loses - that's democracy. They should only resort to democratic means to settle disputes," he told the BBC.

Mr Ouattara told reporters on Wednesday afternoon the uncertainty over the results was worrying.

"It is imperative that the president of the electoral commission proclaims the results," he said.

French concern

Earlier, French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told French radio that "the results must be published today [Wednesday]".

She also said that French forces would be able to intervene if French nationals or interests were affected.

France retains close economic ties to its former colony but Mr Gbagbo's supporters have previously accused France of bias, and French targets in the country have been attacked.

Our reporter points out that the UN peacekeeping mission has copies of the results from all the polling centres and will be able to verify if what is published by the commission corresponds to 20,000 individual results.

The result is expected to be extremely close - testament to the fact these are the first open democratic elections the country has seen in 50 years since independence.

The two candidates represent the two sides of the north-south divide that exists religiously, culturally and administratively, with the northern half still controlled in part by New Forces soldiers who took part in the 2002 rebellion, our reporter says.

The New Forces have officially joined the government in a power-sharing deal.

The elections have been cancelled six times in the past five years.

Read more...

Blaise Compaore re-elected in Burkina Faso landslide

Continue reading the main storyBlaise Compaore has led Burkina Faso for 23 years.

Related stories

• Timeline: Burkina Faso
• Country profile: Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore has been re-elected to lead the gold-producing country in a landslide victory.

Provisional results show that Mr Compaore, who seized power in a bloody coup, won the vote by 80%.

But opposition leaders are calling for the vote to be invalidated claiming it was rigged in Mr Compaore's favour.

Mr Compaore, a former army captain, took power in 1987 after a hit squad gunned down the former president.

On Thursday, a judge ruled that some of the voter cards were "illegal" following a law suit last week which challenged certain aspects of the election.

"The cards were not in conformity with the electoral code," AFP news agency quotes Judge Rene Bagoro as saying.

Opposition parties said the voting cards had allowed ineligible people to vote. They have 48 hours from the time the results are released to file a complaint.

Read more...

Ivory Coast votes in presidential election run-off

A night curfew has been imposed, angering the opposition camp

Continue reading the main story

Related stories

• Will Ivorian party spirit end the coups?
• Cocoa: A mirror to Ivorian splits
• Ivorian election tour

People in the Ivory Coast have been voting in a presidential election run-off, as the nation tries to end a decade of division and instability.

A close race is forecast between President Laurent Gbagbo and opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara.

The election is intended to reunite the country which split in two following a northern rebellion in 2002.

A night curfew has been imposed and will run until Wednesday, following a campaign beset by violence.

At least three people were shot dead in Abidjan on Saturday during protests against the curfew. Supporters of the opposition say it could open the door to electoral fraud.

The military has appealed for calm.

Additional security forces have been deployed around the country and both Mr Gbagbo and Mr Ouattara have appealed for a peaceful vote.

Polling stations opened at 0700 GMT and closed at 1700 GMT, with 5.7 million people eligible to vote.

Long queues were reported in Abidjan while some stations opened late as the curfew prevented ballot officials from arriving on time.

Mr Gbagbo said he had received reports of "irregularities" in some parts of the country, but was was confident the election would be a success.

"We have a lot of hope we will overcome all these irregularities to put in place a veritable democracy," he told reporters.

'Illegal'

Yves Doumbia, a spokesman for the mayor in Abidjan's Abobo neighbourhood, said the three people killed on Saturday died when police opened fire on a crowd which had become unmanageable.

Continue reading the main story

Presidential Contenders

Laurent Gbagbo (left)

• Age: 65
• Southerner, Christian
• Former history teacher, now president
• Took 38% of the first-round vote

Alassane Ouattara (right)

• Age: 68
• Northerner, Muslim
• Economist and former prime minister
• Took 32% of the first-round vote

• Country profile: Ivory Coast

"The police used tear gas and fired live rounds at a crowd, killing three and wounding seven," he told Reuters news agency.

The curfew was announced after earlier clashes in and around Abidjan, the commercial capital, in which at least four people were killed and dozens injured.

Mr Ouattara said the curfew was illegal and unconstitutional, arguing it should only come after the election if there was trouble.

No candidate received more than 50% of the vote in the first round four weeks ago, leaving the two front runners to go head to head.

The result is expected to be extremely close, says the BBC's John James in Abidjan - testament to the fact these are the first open democratic elections the country has seen in 50 years since independence.

The two candidates left in the race represent the two sides of the north-south divide that exists religiously, culturally and administratively, our correspondent says, with the northern half still controlled in part by the soldiers who took part in the 2002 rebellion.

The elections have been cancelled six times in the past five years.

Read more...

Egypt holds parliamentary poll

Continue reading the main storyTurnout is not expected to be much above 10%

Related stories

• Egypt elections: Viewpoints
• Egypt holds opposition supporters
• Banned Egypt party to run in poll

Egyptians have been voting in a parliamentary poll after a campaign that saw clashes between the opposition and security forces.

The ruling NDP party is expected to win the election easily.

Interest centres on whether the officially banned Muslim Brotherhood retains its position as the biggest opposition grouping.

Earlier, the son of a candidate was killed in Cairo but it was unclear whether it was election-related.

There have also been unconfirmed reports of some violence outside the capital involving supporters of the government and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2005, its supporters won about a fifth of the seats, standing as independent candidates.

The BBC's Jon Leyne in Cairo says turnout is not expected to be much above 10% as most Egyptians have long since lost faith in politics and politicians.

Voting complaints

The man who was killed this weekend was putting up posters for his father, an independent candidate, in the hours before voting started.

Continue reading the main story

PARLIAMENTARY VOTE

• 508 members to be elected, 10 appointed by president
• 254 constituencies each return two MPs
• Candidate has to get more than 50% to win outright
• Candidates are elected for five years

• Q&A: Egypt election
• Egypt elections: young voices

Relatives said he was attacked in a poor neighbourhood by two men, and stabbed to death.

They said it was politically motivated, although the authorities have suggested the crime was about a personal matter.

There were other reports of confrontation and violence around the country.

In the northern city of Alexandria, a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, there was a tense stand-off between their supporters and backers of the NDP.

Muslim Brotherhood candidates must stand as independents if they wish to take part in the election, but their supporters said they had been prevented from voting.

"There's no voting going on, just rigging. It's a disgrace," said one voter. "There was no privacy. The ballot boxes were full."

But Abdel-Salam Mahgoub, an NDP candidate in Alexandria, told Reuters the Muslim Brotherhood were "looking for an excuse to cover their failure".

Widespread criticism

Many people have stayed home, fearing election day violence, and the streets of Cairo are exceptionally quiet, our correspondent says.

Some 42m voters are eligible to cast their ballots, with results expected within several days.

President Hosni Mubarak (left, on poster) has ruled Egypt for nearly 30 years

The new parliament will have 518 members, 508 of whom will be elected and 10 will be appointed by presidential decree.

Each of the 254 constituencies will return two MPs representing two sets of people: workers and farmers represent one group, and professionals the other. According to the constitution, the former must account for at least half of all MPs.

The winners are decided on a first-past-the-post basis. To win outright, a candidate must get more than 50% of the vote. Otherwise, the top two battle it out in a second round.

There has already been widespread criticism of the way the election has been conducted.

In a number of seats, the courts have called for the elections to be postponed, because opposition candidates were illegally struck off the ballot.

Some observers believe that the ruling party may win an embarrassingly large victory, further undermining the credibility of these elections.

Read more...

Ghana: Making Sense of our Democracy

The status of Ghana as an emerging democracy has been acknowledged the world over. The opposition New Patriotic Party’s unprecedented flagbearership election on August 7, 2010 that saw the re-election of Nana Akuffo Addo as the party’s candidate for the 2012 elections has added a new and positive dimension to the credentials of Ghana as the pacesetter of Africa politics.  It is fair to say that Ghana’s current democracy which begun in 1992 has come with peace and stability that has made Ghana the darling of her neighbours and the international community. The recent outstanding performance of the Black Stars in the 2010 Fifa world cup in South Africa has added momentum to the worldwide view that Ghana is on the path of greatness.

The essence of democracy is to elect leaders who will manage the country to provide security, energy, housing, education, transport, health and telecommunication infrastructures that the citizens can take advantage of to improve their living conditions. Many who have engaged in the democratic process in Ghana have done so with the hope that democracy will usher in not only liberty, rule of law, political stability, freedom of speech and assembly but also economic prosperity. But the people who have been ruling Ghana since the day the Fourth Republican Constitution came into force seem to have forgotten this simple meaning of democracy.

More than seventeen years since the first ballot was cast and 53 years after independence the life of many Ghanaians has stagnated if not retrogressed to pre-independence levels. A critical look at the economic situation of the people suggests that the stability and peace that democracy has brought the nation has not translated into economic and social development. The various governments that have governed Ghana since 1992 have not been able to take advantage of the peace and stability to formulate and implement the necessary policies needed to transform Ghana’s economy to enable Ghanaians benefit directly. A critical look at the country’s sectors: education, energy, transportation, health and waste management reveal a state of organised disorder.

The CIA’s 2010 world ranking of countries with higher life expectancy puts Ghana at 186^th position (60.55 years) out of the 224 countries polled. Today two-thirds of the population still live on two dollars a day. The inequality and the poverty gap between those who govern and the governed is widening every year. This is evidenced in the number of people working as street vendors including children who work as head potters in our cities instead of going to school and the high number of children being trafficked to work in various parts of the country. There is a sense of anger and frustration among the populace as is indicated by the growing number of unruly behaviour of the so called foot soldiers of the NDC youth with their incessant seizing of public toilets, locking up National Health Insurance Service and National Youth Employment Programme offices and constant calling of District Chief Executives to be fired. These activities suggest that the people are not benefiting from our democracy and are getting increasingly disillusioned, a situation that can easily be nurtured to cause political instability in the country. 

The only people who seem to have benefited from our democracy are the politicians who go home every four years with fat ex-gratia payments while majority of the people live in squalid conditions. Take E. T. Mensah for example. Since 1992 he has been representing Ningo Prampram as an MP and going home with ex-gratia every four years while many people in his constituency can neither read nor write and lack the basic necessities of life including water, electricity and housing.

The expensive and cosy sport utility vehicles (Land Cruisers etc) that has come to represent the taste of NDC and NPP politicians do not reflect the harsh economic life being experienced by majority of the people especially those in the rural areas who live in mud houses roofed with raffia and bamboo leafs and without water and electricity. This is unacceptable and is very dangerous for the continuous existence of democracy itself. People cannot continue to cast their votes every four years and continue to live in the same pre-independence conditions without jobs, proper housing, electricity, roads, farming equipments and access to water and sanitation. People cannot vote every four years while they continue to live on two dollars a day. That is slavery, not democracy. Democracy must come with liberty, economic empowerment, social development and improvement in the overall quality of life of the people. This has not happened in Ghana more than seventeen years of democratic governance and over fifty years of self rule.

Slowly we are missing the opportunity to develop as a nation and to add quality and value to the lives of our people. Despite promises of a better Ghana and jobs for the youth nothing seems to have changed, courtesy the politicians who are trapped in their narrow view of state management and who are going round the circle unable to work out a solution for the nation’s many problems. Slowly many of the people who have placed so much hope in democracy are being betrayed not by democracy as a system but by those elected to lead them to economic freedom. This cannot continue forever.

The people who vote must have something to live up to if they can continue to support the democratic efforts of the state. Therefore, the promises and pledges that characterise our elections must be transformed into actions and deeds. The broken promises and the politics of the same on the part of those who govern must stop before apathy sets in. Those who rule Ghana must recognise that their performance is not measured by what they say but what they do. Therefore we must act now and make good use of our peace, stability and democracy if we want to avoid any cataclysmic political upheaval in future.

In light of the abysmal economic performance of the nation and her inability to reduce poverty, I strongly believe Ghana needs strategic counselling and I want to offer my suggestions here.

First of all, Ghanaians need strategic leaders with the ability to vision and ability to bring the vision into reality; leaders who can turn aspiration into reality and inspire the people to great heights and help build a new Ghana that all of us can be proud of. Those who manage state institutions must be strategic thinkers who can formulate good policies and implement them to bring positive change. The begging mentality (i.e. the focus on aid as a development model) that continues to permeate those who live in the Osu Castle must give way to a more ingenious ways of state management that has as its focus the attraction of foreign investment, promotion of trade, support for indigenous producers, farmers, the promotion of local entrepreneurial development and the building, renovating and expanding the economic and social infrastructures in the country i.e. energy, roads, rail lines, harbours, telecommunication, silos, canals, schools and hospitals. It is unacceptable that while other nations are going outer-space to discover new planets we are still struggling to feed ourselves. Therefore the politics that has come to define our education (3 years for NDC, 4 year for NPP) must give way to a non-partisan approach to problem solving.

Secondly, evidence from Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and China has shown that a country’s economic growth, human development and her ability to reduce poverty are dependent on her technological development. Therefore, if we are to make sense of our 53 years of independence and over seventeen years of democracy; if we are to take advantage of the current favourable political climate and make it a force for good and a force for development, then a ground work for export-driven industrial economy must be laid through the adoption of a comprehensive export-driven industrial strategy. Such a strategy must make the development and acquisition of advanced technologies a priority so as to take advantage of the huge unexploited natural resources in the country, to increase production, and create wealth for the people. Why should our child-bearing women continue to carry their children on their back in this African heat when we can adopt technology to build pushchairs/prams for them? Why should we continue to wash our cloths with our hands when we could adopt the technology to build washers to save us precious time? Why should we continue to sleep in darkness when we could adopt the technology to convert solar energy into electricity? Why should our farmers continue to farm with cutlasses and hoes when we could adopt advanced farming technologies to increase yield and reduce hunger and poverty in the country? And why should we continue to carry things on our head when we could use technology to do it?

China and India’s development of their own technologies and their acquisition of technologies from the West has shown that it is possible to move hundreds of millions of people from poverty through technology acquisition. I believe that nations that turn away from the development and use of science and technology are bound to remain primitive and face extinction, and even if those nations survive extinction they will probably remain slave to others with superior technologies. Ghana cannot afford to remain technologically backward while our independence peers in Asia are moving forward scientifically and technologically and the earlier the policy-makers in Ghana look into technology acquisition the better.

Added to the above point is the fact that Ghana cannot continue to depend on the export of some few raw materials while the population continues to increase almost exponentially. Ghana cannot remain agrarian if we are to solve the teeming unemployment problem, eradicate poverty, hunger, malnutrition, malaria and improve the overall quality of life in the country. The policymakers must device ingenious schemes and work assiduously to diversify Ghana’s economy by shifting emphasis from the current reliance on raw material export to manufacturing, service, and knowledge based economy. The diversification of the economy will not only help the nation expand her revenue base but will also lead to increased production, create more jobs and protect the country from the shocks that always threaten the vivacity of our economy.

Lastly, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning must be told in plain language that lowering inflation alone will not meet the aspirations of unemployed Ghanaians who are looking for jobs. The National Development Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning must live up to their names and build some credibility for themselves as institutions tasked with planning the nation’s development. Ghana deserves better fiscal policies/financial management than it has been offered by Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning. These institutions must think strategically and device strategies with inbuilt policy priorities to stabilise the nation’s financial market, revive the defunct firms, create jobs and put money in the pockets of the people.

I want to conclude by saying that if Ghanaians are to make sense of democracy, cherish its values and ideals; if indeed democracy is to thrive in Ghana, and if Ghana is to continue to serve as the guiding light for the rest of Africa, then more must be done to improve the economic well-being of the people, for democracy without economic and social development is a catalyst for chaos.

By Lord Aikins Adusei*

*The author is a political activist and anti corruption campaigner. His e-mail is politicalthinker1@yahoo.com

Read more...