According to the Director General of the elections governing body Elecam, Erik Essousse, nearly 183,000 persons registered on the just ended electoral lists, with an increase of potential voters as compared to last year.
Electoral lists for the year 2021 opened earlier this year in January and closed Tuesday August 31 as prescribed in the electoral code. Going by statistics recorded during this 2021 revision exercise, nearly 183, 000 persons have enrolled on the electoral registers, bringing the total number of potential voters registered in Cameroon to 7,000,000, pending clean up.
These statistics were unveiled by the Director General of Elections Cameroon, Elecam, Erik Essousse Wednesday September 1 during a press briefing.
According to updated figures, out of the nearly 183,000 who have just registered, 116,631 are men, representing 65.79%, 66,282 are women representing 34.21%, 131,778 are youths, representing 72.04% and 187 are persons with disabilities with a 0.09%.
After listing statistics recorded during the revision process, Erik Essousse said the overall number of registered voters in the country now stand at 7,000,000, pending clean up. Out of the 7,000,000, 3,761,159 are men, giving a 53.28%, 3,296,663 are women with a 46.71%, meanwhile 2,677,674 are youths with a 37.94%.
Elecam’s Director General added that with the close of the registration exercise, focus would be on the cleaning of registers. Upon completion of this clean-up process, provisional electoral registers will be published not later than October 20 at the respective Elecam branches, particularly council branches. After all corrections must have been made at the level of the branches, the Director will then publish the final national electoral register not later than December 30.
Though this year recorded another increase in the number of potential voters to have registered, Elecam is still far from its 10 million citizens enrolled objective set to achieve since 2019. Officials of the elections governing body in the country have attributed this to the COVID-19 pandemic, which according to them has discouraged many Cameroonians. That notwithstanding, they are determined to continue the sensitization to get 10 million enrolled ahead of the next elections in the country.
Ariane Foguem
