Jan 01 2003
After several weeks of heated campaigning by the political parties, peaceful local council election took place in Somaliland on December15, 2002. The local council election was a positive step in the right direction and a milestone for the democratic development of the country.
Participating in the first democratic election in the country, in more than 30 years, was an exciting affair for everybody who was involved in it, but it was particularly so for the youth who formed the largest section of the population in the country. The youth actively participated in the election process as observers, as enumerators, as certifiers and, more importantly, as voters. For them, the local election was a learning process on electoral democracy and a great introduction to one of the most important aspect of western democracy i.e. the right to vote.
In immediate retrospective, there have been a variety of legal ambiguities and /or fallacies and technical hurdles, which negatively impacted on the election process. And while some of these can be explained away as inevitable, many others could have been remedied or avoided altogether in time.
The current constitution of Somaliland limits the number of legal political parties to three. The political party registration law clarifies this issue further by stating that any three parties that secure 20% of the votes of four regions in the country shall gain legal personality. But the election process could have technically produced four or five parties with 20% of the votes in given four regions of the country and the law, needless to say, was silent on how to deal with this kind of a possible scenario.
The six regions of the country are not equally endowed with respect to the number of their populations. The population of some of the regions approaches half a million, while in others it is less than 25 thousand. The law discounts regional population variations, therefore, when it equally demands from all political parties to secure 20 % of the votes from any given four regions, irrespective of their populations.The law also is statistically biased against political parties, which have supporters concentrated in the more populated centers of the country, like the capital..
Indeed, the three party limitations of the constitution and the 20% threshold requirement were the two sides of the same coin of obstacles, which the ex-president put in place to load the dice against rival political parties. And as it is shown by the latest local election results, only UDUB, the government party, managed to reach the 20% threshold (it indeed secured 40.7% of the total number of votes). KULMIYE came next with 18.8% of the votes.
As the deadline for submitting party lists to the electoral commission approached, the two political parties of HORMOOD and BIRSOL joined in a union and submitted a single list of candidates to the electoral commission. The two political parties also declared Omar Arte as their candidate of choice for the presidency. The union of the two parties, from the same sub-clan, injected a tribal factor into what was, otherwise, a healthy electioneering campaign. From the union of HORMOOD and BIRSOL onwards, notices of resignations of party officials from a certain political party or another started to appear in the local papers and party supporters began to transmigrate between the parties, mostly 'for-my-tribe' sort of reasons.
And SAHAN political party reinforced the trend towards tribal electioneering. Being a latecomer to the political scene (the ownership of SAHAN was claimed by two opposing groups for some time and it was only 24 hours before the deadline for submitting party lists to the commission that the Party Registration Committee granted the chairmanship of the party to Dr. Gaboose), SAHAN leadership thought to itself that the only way that they could possibly secure supporters at this eleventh hour was to utilize the tribal card, which they did palpably.
Most of the polling stations in the local elections (600 out of the total 800) were the same polling stations that were used in the 2001 constitutional referendum of the country. Initially, the selection of referendum polling stations were not based on a census conducted on the population of the regions in the country, and using the same polling stations again for the local elections was unwarranted at best. Other ways of distributing the polling stations should have been explored. The arbitrary distribution of the polling stations did have negative implications for the fairness of the election process.
Shortly after the opening of polling stations at 7:00 o’clock, the people formed long queues to vote for the parties of their choice. As time progressed, the voting process became so slow that people started to grow impatient. One culprits that was responsible for the delay was the requirement to register the full names of the voters, their age and the name of their mothers. Noticing this, the commission changed horses in midstream and informed polling station minders to confine themselves to writing down the first name of the voters only.
The way that electoral commission timed the duration of the voting in the election day was indeed chaotic. Many days before the election, the commission publicized that the polling stations will open on the election Day at 6:00 A.M, and will remain open until 10:00 P.M. But as the Makhrib prayer approached, the commission issued a new order to close all the polls at 6:00. While some polling stations closed in time, others remained open for hours and people kept on voting.
The dye used for marking the people after voting was removable and many people managed to vote second or third time. I have met a man who told me that he used a cough syrup for his sick child to remove the dye from his hand and that he was ready to vote again for his party! Many women with Henna on their finger also voted more than once. No need to make cottage houses out of these as they were not widespread as such, and were too insignificant to have tipped the balance for one party or another, if at all.
Majority of the political parties did not send party observers to most of the polling stations. Sending observers to polling stations is a costly business and few parties, like Kulmiye and UDUB, managed to send sufficient number of party observers to polling stations. Most of the political parties lacked the funds to cover such a luxury.
On its part, the media had its fair share of the action, both in the pre-election campaign and afterwards. Every statement made by one party leader or another kept appearing on a bold face in the headlines. These statements, sometimes, came in the form of mudslings against rival political parties. In one instance, President Riyaale exchanged swords with Muse Bihi of Kulmiye party, when the latter described President Riyaales’s trip to Sool region as a failure for the government and its UDUB party.
In a speech at Khayriya the next day, president Riyaale accused Muse Bihi of being a tribalist and a warmonger. President Riyaale cited a speech Mr.Bihi made when he was the minister of the interior in 1994. In the speech, Mr. Bihi blatantly threatened the opposition to the government by quoting a saying from a poem by Hadraawi, in which the latter, referring to the forces of Siad Barre, declares that: Anigoo wax dili kara duco qaadan maayo, ee debci qorigu hay faro!!!
When the election ended, local papers started to predict the results. But due to the absence of exit polls expertise, papers invariably based the predication of election result on the whims of their editors. This was particularly true of Jamhuuriya newspaper, which, day after day, fed readers with bogus election results. In the end, the presentations of the bogus election results turned out profitable for Jamhuuriya, as it managed to sell more and thus increase its circulation.
Finally, given the socio-economic development of our people and the parochial nature of our political culture, the peaceful manner that the election took place was beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
After several weeks of heated campaigning by the political parties, peaceful local council election took place in Somaliland on December15, 2002. The local council election was a positive step in the right direction and a milestone for the democratic development of the country.
Participating in the first democratic election in the country, in more than 30 years, was an exciting affair for everybody who was involved in it, but it was particularly so for the youth who formed the largest section of the population in the country. The youth actively participated in the election process as observers, as enumerators, as certifiers and, more importantly, as voters. For them, the local election was a learning process on electoral democracy and a great introduction to one of the most important aspect of western democracy i.e. the right to vote.
In immediate retrospective, there have been a variety of legal ambiguities and /or fallacies and technical hurdles, which negatively impacted on the election process. And while some of these can be explained away as inevitable, many others could have been remedied or avoided altogether in time.
The current constitution of Somaliland limits the number of legal political parties to three. The political party registration law clarifies this issue further by stating that any three parties that secure 20% of the votes of four regions in the country shall gain legal personality. But the election process could have technically produced four or five parties with 20% of the votes in given four regions of the country and the law, needless to say, was silent on how to deal with this kind of a possible scenario.
The six regions of the country are not equally endowed with respect to the number of their populations. The population of some of the regions approaches half a million, while in others it is less than 25 thousand. The law discounts regional population variations, therefore, when it equally demands from all political parties to secure 20 % of the votes from any given four regions, irrespective of their populations.The law also is statistically biased against political parties, which have supporters concentrated in the more populated centers of the country, like the capital..
Indeed, the three party limitations of the constitution and the 20% threshold requirement were the two sides of the same coin of obstacles, which the ex-president put in place to load the dice against rival political parties. And as it is shown by the latest local election results, only UDUB, the government party, managed to reach the 20% threshold (it indeed secured 40.7% of the total number of votes). KULMIYE came next with 18.8% of the votes.
As the deadline for submitting party lists to the electoral commission approached, the two political parties of HORMOOD and BIRSOL joined in a union and submitted a single list of candidates to the electoral commission. The two political parties also declared Omar Arte as their candidate of choice for the presidency. The union of the two parties, from the same sub-clan, injected a tribal factor into what was, otherwise, a healthy electioneering campaign. From the union of HORMOOD and BIRSOL onwards, notices of resignations of party officials from a certain political party or another started to appear in the local papers and party supporters began to transmigrate between the parties, mostly 'for-my-tribe' sort of reasons.
And SAHAN political party reinforced the trend towards tribal electioneering. Being a latecomer to the political scene (the ownership of SAHAN was claimed by two opposing groups for some time and it was only 24 hours before the deadline for submitting party lists to the commission that the Party Registration Committee granted the chairmanship of the party to Dr. Gaboose), SAHAN leadership thought to itself that the only way that they could possibly secure supporters at this eleventh hour was to utilize the tribal card, which they did palpably.
Most of the polling stations in the local elections (600 out of the total 800) were the same polling stations that were used in the 2001 constitutional referendum of the country. Initially, the selection of referendum polling stations were not based on a census conducted on the population of the regions in the country, and using the same polling stations again for the local elections was unwarranted at best. Other ways of distributing the polling stations should have been explored. The arbitrary distribution of the polling stations did have negative implications for the fairness of the election process.
Shortly after the opening of polling stations at 7:00 o’clock, the people formed long queues to vote for the parties of their choice. As time progressed, the voting process became so slow that people started to grow impatient. One culprits that was responsible for the delay was the requirement to register the full names of the voters, their age and the name of their mothers. Noticing this, the commission changed horses in midstream and informed polling station minders to confine themselves to writing down the first name of the voters only.
The way that electoral commission timed the duration of the voting in the election day was indeed chaotic. Many days before the election, the commission publicized that the polling stations will open on the election Day at 6:00 A.M, and will remain open until 10:00 P.M. But as the Makhrib prayer approached, the commission issued a new order to close all the polls at 6:00. While some polling stations closed in time, others remained open for hours and people kept on voting.
The dye used for marking the people after voting was removable and many people managed to vote second or third time. I have met a man who told me that he used a cough syrup for his sick child to remove the dye from his hand and that he was ready to vote again for his party! Many women with Henna on their finger also voted more than once. No need to make cottage houses out of these as they were not widespread as such, and were too insignificant to have tipped the balance for one party or another, if at all.
Majority of the political parties did not send party observers to most of the polling stations. Sending observers to polling stations is a costly business and few parties, like Kulmiye and UDUB, managed to send sufficient number of party observers to polling stations. Most of the political parties lacked the funds to cover such a luxury.
On its part, the media had its fair share of the action, both in the pre-election campaign and afterwards. Every statement made by one party leader or another kept appearing on a bold face in the headlines. These statements, sometimes, came in the form of mudslings against rival political parties. In one instance, President Riyaale exchanged swords with Muse Bihi of Kulmiye party, when the latter described President Riyaales’s trip to Sool region as a failure for the government and its UDUB party.
In a speech at Khayriya the next day, president Riyaale accused Muse Bihi of being a tribalist and a warmonger. President Riyaale cited a speech Mr.Bihi made when he was the minister of the interior in 1994. In the speech, Mr. Bihi blatantly threatened the opposition to the government by quoting a saying from a poem by Hadraawi, in which the latter, referring to the forces of Siad Barre, declares that: Anigoo wax dili kara duco qaadan maayo, ee debci qorigu hay faro!!!
When the election ended, local papers started to predict the results. But due to the absence of exit polls expertise, papers invariably based the predication of election result on the whims of their editors. This was particularly true of Jamhuuriya newspaper, which, day after day, fed readers with bogus election results. In the end, the presentations of the bogus election results turned out profitable for Jamhuuriya, as it managed to sell more and thus increase its circulation.
Finally, given the socio-economic development of our people and the parochial nature of our political culture, the peaceful manner that the election took place was beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
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