Campaign winding up for historic but problem-fraught poll

The billboards are up, the candidates are on the campaign trail, the bands are playing and the voodoo priests are praying for peace. In two days Benin votes for a new president in a poll whose run-up has been fraught with problems. The 5 March elections will bring down the curtain on two of the tiny country’s most celebrated politicians - incumbent President Mathieu Kerekou, who has served two consecutive five-year terms, and his longtime rival, ex-president Nicephore Soglo. Both have outlived the 70-year constitutional age barrier to run for the presidency. Their parting opens the floodgates to a bevy of would-be presidents, with 26 candidates - two of them women - currently criss-crossing the country in search of support. “Things will change! Things must change,” “The right man,” “He knows the country best,” say posters plastered across the country of seven million. Political parties brought musicians and dancers out to drum up support and hired as escorts scores of the country’s iconic motorcycle taxis, or “zemidjans”, their drivers turned out in crisp neat new uniforms for the occasion. Despite weeks of financial problems in organising the poll and a series of glitches in the voter registration process, the two-week campaign winding up on Friday has been essentially trouble-free. “We young people well understand that there must be no violence,” said teenager Samson Djimedo. “In my house for example my mother and sisters are backing Yayi Boni, while I’m for Severin Sadjovi and my father is an Adrien Houngbedji supporter. We all go out and support them in the daytime but then get together at home quietly.” In this country held up as a beacon of democracy in troubled West Africa, civil society groups have aired pro-peace messages on TV and radio, churches have prayed for a peaceful poll and the voodoo authorities are asking to see peace reign over Benin.

Outgoing President Mathieu Kerekou has served two terms

Voter registration glitches Sunday’s vote will be Benin’s fourth presidential election since the return of multiparty politics in 1990, after almost two decades of a one-party Marxist regime installed by Kerekou, a retired general who staged a coup in 1972. He returned to office on winning elections in 1996 and then in 2001, and is nicknamed “The Chameleon” for dumping communism in favour of evangelical Christianity. But when the government late last year said it had run out of funds to finance the election, opposition leaders suggested Kerekou allies were planning a change in the constitution to allow him to run again. The president however has repeatedly pledged to hand over power. The election budget however shrank from a planned 19 billion CFA francs (US $34.7 million) to 10 billion CFA francs then finally to 6.6 billion CFA francs - two thirds of which has been provided by foreign donors. The shortfall triggered outrage across Benin, with citizens pledging to dig into their own pockets and calling for a national fund-a-poll. It also caused hiccups in the voter registration process - necessary for the issuance of voter cards - with electoral workers in some districts halting operations to complain about being insufficiently paid and others taking off with the voter rolls in protest. The latest but not the least of the problems to cloud the historic election is a current dispute about the number of voters, which the National Electoral Commission puts at 3,951,029 - a figure that politicians and analysts alike say is far too high. Speaking during a TV debate on Thursday, government statistician Michel Makphenon said the increase was unrealistic and that the likely correct number of voters was 3.6 million. Will such problems spell trouble in Benin next week if there are charges of fraud and vote rigging? “We will need to watch how the vote takes place and the proclamation of results, this will determine our hopes or fears,” said Robert Dossou, a law lecturer in the economic capital Cotonou. “For the moment the campaign is taking place normally.” “I am not especially afraid of violence, but nothing can be excluded,” he added. “The last elections were peaceful.”