YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – Against a backdrop of poverty, violence and de facto one-man rule, a Catholic archbishop in Cameroon has blasted the perceived lack of true democracy ahead of elections scheduled for next year.

“Democracy in Cameroon exists only in name; in reality, it does not exist,” said Mgr Samuel Kleda, Archbishop of Douala, in an interview with local television channel Equinox TV.

“Before the vote, we already know who will win,” Kleda said. “This is not democracy.”

At 91, President Paul Biya of Cameroon is both the world’s oldest head of state and the longest-serving non-royal national leader. He has held the presidency since 1982, having served as Prime Minister from 1975 to 1982.

After imposing a one-party system on the country for the first decade of his rule, Biya reluctantly accepted the 1992 democratic elections, winning them and subsequent elections in 1997, 2004, 2011 and 2018, in each case on the merits widespread accusations of fraud.

The aging Biya was recently forced to cancel several planned engagements abroad, including a planned participation in the summit of French-speaking nations in France on October 4-5, and is reportedly currently under medical surveillance at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva, in Switzerland. Nonetheless, his supporters are urging him to run again in next year’s elections.

Catholicism represents approximately 40 percent of Cameroon’s population and plays an important social role in the country; Biya himself is the son of catechists and a former Catholic seminarian. The Church has long been a critical voice, with the late Cardinal Christian Tumi frequently challenging the Biya regime on peace, human rights and democracy.

Kleda continues this tradition by attacking the institution responsible for organizing elections in Cameroon-Elections Cameroun (ELECAM), arguing that what has been called an independent electoral body is anything but: a majority of members, a- he noted, come from Biya’s political party.

“Who organizes elections in Cameroon? This must be clearly defined,” Kleda said.

“As the saying goes, people don’t run elections to lose them,” Kleda said in his interview. “That says it all.”

The religious’s concerns have found ground among Cameroonian political leaders.

Prince Ekosso, leader of the United Socialist Party (USDP), a leading opposition force, echoed Kleda’s sentiments, advocating reforms such as lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, the introduction of a single ballot paper and the empowerment of local electoral commissions to declare election results.

Muma Bih Yvonne, national secretary for political education and training of the Social Democratic Front of Cameroon, called for a complete overhaul of the electoral process, from registration to the proclamation of results.

“We all know that in any civilized democracy, the electoral calendar is known well in advance. This is not the case for Cameroon,” she said. Nodereferring to the fact that the head of state decides the dates of the elections.

“I think the electoral code needs to be revised,” she said, insisting that citizens’ access to registration centers should be made easier because “registering is very tedious.”

“You’re registered, you can’t get a voter card straight away,” she said.

“Cameroonians have neither the money nor the time to repeatedly visit electoral offices to check whether they are registered or not. Why not computerize the process from registration to declaration of results? It’s very possible,” she said. Node.

“During the elections themselves, when the polling stations open, why distribute cards on that day when they say that once identified as Cameroonian, you can use your identity card to vote?”

She urged that ELECAM, the elections management body, should “involve all stakeholders to discuss why Cameroon cannot copy best practices from other countries. Other countries hold elections and the next day the results are ready.”

She says it is abnormal that the results of the elections in Cameroon take more than a month to be announced.

Experts have suggested that the long wait for results allows the ruling party to falsify them.

Bih also complained about what she called “the horrible problem of multiple ballots.”

“Use a single ballot and you will see how it will reduce fraud in the electoral process,” she said. After every election there are disputes because people are unhappy with the process.

Kleda stressed that such changes are essential to the conduct of “free, democratic and fraud-free” elections.

“If these conditions are met, we will really see who will win the elections in our country,” he said.

Elections in Cameroon usually end in lawsuits, with opposition parties always claiming the elections were rigged. The last presidential election in 2018 is a perfect example, in which the opposition candidate, Maurice Kamto, claimed victory.

The leader of the Cameroonian Renaissance Movement called last April for the resignation of the director general of ELECAM, accusing him of being “on a mission against the Cameroonian people.”

Kleda called for “a change to the electoral code so that all candidates have an equal chance and the best one wins.”

Cameroonian political scientist Immanuel Tatah Mentan has accused Biya’s party, the ruling Cameroonian People’s Democratic Movement, of perfecting the art of electoral fraud.

“No opposition political party or candidate can bring down Biya,” he said, predicting that if that were to happen, “the CPDM will implode.”

Cameroon faces a host of social challenges, including estimates that one in five Cameroonians live in extreme poverty, and a long-running, sometimes violent, insurgency in the country’s southern and southwest regions within of Cameroon’s English-speaking minority, who complain of systematic prejudice and second-class citizenship.