Central African Republic in full biometric voter registration preparations

The Central African Republic (CAR) is in the process of organizing local elections it has not held since 1988. The country, which has lived an unsettling decade rocked by political instability and strife since 2013, has been struggling to put things together for the vote. The tentative date for the polls has been fixed for April 6, 2025, months before presidential and legislative elections scheduled for December of the same year.

As part of the preparations, the National Election Authority (ANE) will in the days ahead launch a biometric voter registration drive which seeks to revise the country’s electoral register. According to ANE, the biometric voter registration process was due to begin on September 23, but it has been pushed to a later date due to certain technical challenges. Once launched, it will run till December 30, 2024.

In the build-up to this, ANE and other government institutions have done a lot of work to ensure that the exercise achieves the intended results. This has included the holding of meetings, the reception of voter registration material, the training of field enrollment personnel, configuration and testing of the enrollment devices as well as a nationwide awareness-raising campaign to sensitize citizens on the importance of the exercise which is critical for the upcoming elections.

Several sources indicate that the biometric enrollment software and hardware is provided by Dutch biometric firm Genkey.

Recently, officials of the election management agency held a meeting with representatives of the company to discuss ways through which the biometric enrollment exercise can unfold successfully. Information emerged from the meeting, according to ANE, that Genkey officials have promised to improve the software so that the exercise can unfold hitch-free.

Genkey’s system was also used for voter registration before general elections in the country in 2020, with President Faustin-Archange Touadera the first person to be biometrically enrolled into the electoral register at the time.

The company didn’t reply to an email requesting comment on its involvement in the CAR voter registration activity.

Election material in place

Ahead of the start of the electoral process, several meetings have been held to set things on the right rails, despite a litany of operational difficulties, the head of Communication at ANE, Saint Régis Zoumiri, confirmed to Biometric Update in a chat from Bangui.

On September 8, ANE announced the arrival of some material to be used for the voter registration exercise. In a post on its Facebook account, the election agency said the items included 1,680,000 registration forms, 48,000 amendment forms, and 36,000 transfer and deregistration forms.

“Serious steps are now being taken to revise the electoral register in the Central African Republic,” the Authority said, calling the items an “important component” of the voter registration process.

Electoral Commissioners of ANE, in a meeting held on September 5, had reviewed the state of progress of preparation for the voter registration process, and agreed on strategies of making the exercise yield the expected results.

In a press conference in late August, a spokesperson for the election agency, Théophile Momokoama, told local and international reporters that preparations for the exercise were far advanced. He mentioned among other things that more than 70 percent of financial resources had been mobilized, while over 2,000 enrollment personnel had received adequate training on how to effortlessly operate the biometric tablets on the field. The official also mentioned that ANE had received at least 3,000 biometric enrollment tablets as part of preparations for the voter registration.

Lack of ID may affect voter registration participation

As the country looks forward to the start of biometric voter registration in the days ahead, one major problem staring citizens of the poor central African country in the face is the lack of national ID documents.

According to the country’s laws, any of three documents, namely the national ID card, birth certificate and passport, can be used as proof of identity at the time of registration. But obtaining any of these is a herculean task.

Jean-Fernand Koena, a CAR journalist working in Bangui told Biometric Update that many citizens lack one or all of these documents especially in remote and difficult-to-access parts of the country. He noted that because of the activities of rebels which have fragilized security in the country, national ID cards and other vital identity credentials are issued only in the capital, which makes it costly for a majority of citizens in far-flung communities to afford.

“This situation risks keeping many potential voters away from the voter registration process,” he says.

However, he mentions that because government authorities are aware of the ID card issuance difficulties, the ANE will resort to relying on verbal testimonies from local authorities such as traditional chiefs to confirm people’s identity at registration centers to get them enrolled.

Also, as part of efforts to decentralize the ID card issuance process, an ID card enrollment center was opened a few months ago in Bambari, one of the most populous towns of the country, according to RFI.

Apart from issue of distance, Central Africans have often complained of the high fee involved in obtaining ID cards.

Al Madina, an Oman-headquartered security printing company which is in charge of producing the document, has been accused of increasing the fee from FCFA 4,500 (US$8) as fixed by the country’s finance law, to FCFA 6,750 ($11) which is seen as too much for ordinary citizens in the poor nation to afford.

These problems notwithstanding, President Touadera, in a press conference in Bangui on August 2, spoke about the significance of the upcoming local elections, urging his compatriots to massively take part in the biometric voter registration exercise in order prepare themselves for election day.

External support for electoral process

As a result of political instability and acute security challenges in the country, the CAR has struggled with everything, including public finances. From the resources already mobilized, the country was able to get funding from neighboring friendly nations like Cameroon and from international development partners such as the United Nations.

On June 11, the country’s Minister of Finance and the Budget, Hervé Ndoba, met Cameroon’s Prime Minister, Dr. Joseph Dion Ngute, to discussion the elections. At the end of the discussion, the CAR government official said he expressed gratitude to the government of Cameroon for providing support to CAR to the tune of FCFA 250 million ($426,500) for the organization of the upcoming elections.

“We had a very important meeting with His Excellency the Prime Minister and we were here to talk about the mobilization of finances for the process of organizing local elections in our country. This is a very important activity for our country because it’s been more than 36 years that these elections have not happened,” Ndoba said then, as quoted by government-run bi-weekly tabloid Cameroon Insider.

“We are very pleased to announce that the government of Cameroon has agreed to support us with an amount of FCFA 250 million in order to carry out this process which is very important for us. We are very happy and we extend our gratitude to the highest authority of the Republic of Cameroon for helping us.”

The financial support from Cameroon was concretized through an agreement signed in Bangui on August 22 in the presence of CAR Prime Minister, Félix Moloua.

Collaboration, information-sharing

Political instability and rebel activities have weakened the capacity of the country in strengthening its public institutions. In the buildup to the local elections, and particularly the voter registration process, the country’s election agency has had support from similar agencies in neighboring countries.

On a number of occasions, ANE delegations from Bangui have paid working visits to the election management agency of Cameroon (ELECAM) for knowledge-sharing. They have used the opportunity to learn how ELECAM has been going about organizing elections in Cameroon and how it is integrating digital technology into the electoral process. Cameroon has been conducting biometric voter registration since 2012.

Apart from institutional and technical support from Cameroon, ANE has also enjoyed multifaceted support from international development partners in previous elections, and the upcoming local elections are no different. These partners include the UNDP, the governments of the UK, U.S., Germany, and Japan as well as continental and regional political bodies like the African Union and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), per a blog article by the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission for the CAR (MINUSCA).

In a recent trip to Cameroon, the Chairman of ANE, Mathias Barthélémy Morouba, met with the diplomatic representatives of Belgium, Canada, Germany Japan, and Korea in Yaounde to discuss support for the electoral process.

Second voter registration drive in four years

This is the second voter registration drive in the CAR in four years. It would be recalled that ahead of the 2020 presidential and legislative elections, ANE conducted a biometric voter registration which ran for several weeks in all the 16 prefectures of the country.

During that voter registration drive, over 1.8 million new names were added to the voter’s register in a move that sought to create a reliable electoral database for the country of around five million inhabitants. It is expected that well over that number will be registered in this new campaign.

Following the adoption of a new electoral code for the country in 2019, the ANE has been at work to ensure that it helps the poor country conduct free, fair and credible elections as part of an ongoing process to rebuild and bring prosperity to a nation which has for many years seen nothing but political instability, acute poverty and stagnation.

Article Topics

Africa  |  biometric enrollment  |  biometrics  |  Central African Republic  |  elections  |  GenKey  |  voter registration