STATEMENT ON THE INTERFERENCE OF THE UNITED NATIONS IN THE ELECTORAL PROCESS IN CAMEROON

On 09 May 2025, the United Nations decided, in its own way, to intervene in the electoral process in Cameroon. Its entry into the arena took the form of the signing of a partnership agreement under which the United Nations would provide Elections Cameroun (ELECAM) with technical assistance for the « 2025-2027 electoral cycle ». The two UN signatories were Mr Issa Sanogo, Resident Coordinator of the United Nations system in Cameroon and, in this capacity, the Secretary-General’s representative, and Mr Opia Mensah Kumah, Acting Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Cameroon. ELECAM was represented by Mr Enow Abrams Egbe, Chairman of the Electoral Council, and Mr Erik Essousse, Director General of Elections.

In violation of their internal rules on transparency, the concerned local United Nations officials failed to communicate properly on the said convention. This attitude on the part of the United Nations, which is just as regrettable as ELECAM’s unseemly approach, was the subject of an initial statement by the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) on 14 May 2025 (« annex 1 ») denouncing and condemning, in particular, the lack of transparency surrounding the convention and the exclusion of political parties from the process. ELECAM’s press release published on 15 May was far from providing the desired clarity regarding the content of the convention. The press release was deliberately vague and misleading when it claimed that the project in question was « the result of the recommendations made by the Assessment Mission dispatched to Cameroon by the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1 to 12 July 2024 ». In the brief description of the project it contains, the agreement mentions instead that it was ELECAM that requested, in a letter dated 13 May 2024, « technical assistance from the United Nations for the 2025-2026 electoral cycle », which request triggered the deployment in Cameroon of an electoral needs assessment mission in July 2024.

Through other statements dated 22, 24 and 28 May 2025 (« annexes 2, 3 and 4 »), the CRM reiterated the pernicious and dangerous character for democracy in Cameroon of the opacity maintained around the content of the convention due to its non-publication, denounced once again the exclusion of the major actors in the electoral process, the political parties, from the drafting phase of the assistance project and called for the moral and political responsibility of the United Nations. In the statement of 28 May 2025 in particular, the CRM, the Alliance for Change (APC) and the People of Change « call(ed) on the UN to become fully aware of the negative role that the outgoing Cameroonian regime wants it to play in the forthcoming presidential election ». Unless (the UN) has decided, against democratic values and the interests of the Cameroonian people, and above all against its cardinal mission of conflict prevention, to support the incumbent Cameroonian dictatorship to the very end and come what may ».

As local UN officials remained deaf to our public appeals, we wrote to them a letter on 02 June 2025 (« annex 5 ») in which we made the following two main requests: firstly, to be granted access to the text and all documents relating to the agreement between ELECAM and the United Nations and, secondly, the publication of the said agreement so that the Cameroonian people could become aware of it. On 05 June, the signed text of the agreement was uploaded onto the website of the United Nations system in Cameroon, thus giving the public the opportunity to become acquainted with it. In a letter dated 09 June (« appendix 6 »), Mr Issa Sanogo, the Resident Representative of the United Nations system sent us the text of the same agreement as well as and a copy of one of the related documents entitled « Recommendations of the Needs Assessment Mission to the Republic of Cameroon. Mission dates: 1-12 July 2024 ». On 11 June 2025, we again wrote to Mr. Issa Sanogo to ask him to make available to us all the documents relating to this project, whether they had been produced by the United Nations or were simply in their possession, documents to which the agreement refers in the following terms: « The project (of 09 May) is based on past and current programmatic experience in peacebuilding and governance – including in particular the Project « Strengthening capacities in support of peaceful electoral processes and social cohesion in Cameroon », a project financed by the PBF-under the IRF modality from September 2018 to February 2020″. From its title, this latest project document – made available to us on 13 June – gives the impression that the United Nations has been playing a major role for many years in « strengthening capacities in support of peaceful electoral processes and social cohesion in Cameroon » since 2018!

A contextual examination of the available documents points in the opposite direction. Instead, the analysis leads to the conclusion that the United Nations has chosen to support the electoral fraud underway in Cameroon. This posture on the part of the United Nations is not new. Rather, it is revealing its most harmful expression for the Cameroonian people through the UN’s association, fraught with consequences, with the regime in power and its supporting institutions within the framework of the convention of 09 May 2025. Here is how and why.

Through the agreement of 09 May 2025, the United Nations intends to become involved in a project whose « ultimate objective is to contribute to the creation and maintenance of an environment of trust and serenity between the main electoral stakeholders, to strengthen the capacity of ELECAM staff and field agents in the preparation and management of elections, and to promote inclusive citizen participation and civic education during this electoral process ». More specifically, the United Nations undertakes to « promote multi-stakeholder dialogue to ease the electoral process, in particular through consultative platforms… » and to « promote the inclusion, civic participation and civic education of all stakeholders in the electoral process, in particular women, young people… ». (emphasis added)

What the United Nations is deliberately turning a blind eye to in May 2025 is the socio-political context in which the project has been conceived and is supposed to be carried out. This context is marked by the stubborn refusal of the current government and ELECAM to provide the slightest solution to the serious problems posed by the current electoral process, raised by the CRM, other political parties and several civil society organisations and personalities. These include :

 the rejection of the consensual reform of the Electoral Code, which the United Nations’ partner of choice, ELECAM, itself recognised as necessary following the 2018 presidential election. Indeed, since 2013, after the first implementation of the current Electoral Code during the coupled legislative and municipal elections of that year, the then Director General of ELECAM had declared that the Code would be revised. Following the 2018 presidential election, both ELECAM and the African Union – which was the only international organisation to report on the election – stressed the need to revise the Electoral Code. In 2023, a group of 7 opposition parties (4 of which are represented in the National Assembly and 5 in municipal councils) created a platform open to all other political parties, civil society and all Cameroonian citizens to work on proposals for a consensual reform of the Electoral Code. The results of their work were submitted to the Cameroonian authorities, to the United Nations agencies represented in Cameroon, in particular to the Coordination of the United Nations system, as well as to the diplomatic missions, the African Union and the European Union. Despite this convergence on the need to revise the Electoral Code and the efforts of political parties and civil society to contribute to it, nothing has been done by the Cameroonian government to date.

– the fact that millions of Cameroonians, including those in the diaspora, are illegally and arbitrarily prevented from registering to vote;

– ELECAM’s refusal to comply with the Electoral Code in force, the provisions of which it blithely and obstinately violates;

– the arrogant refusal of the coalition constituted by ELECAM, the Electoral Council, the Constitutional Council and the judicial courts to make public the « national electoral list » in accordance with Article 80 of the Electoral Code;

– the denial of justice by all the national courts called upon to ensure compliance with the Electoral Code, including the Constitutional Council;

– the deletion from the electoral roll, by ELECAM with the complicity of private European companies, of many Cameroonians who are regularly registered on the electoral roll for no known reason; this deletion has a particular impact on women, young people and vulnerable people who are listed by the United Nations as beneficiaries of the project, victims as they are of the structural obstacles that prevent them from taking part in the vote.

– the failure to respect the electoral timetable by postponing the legislative and municipal elections from February 2025 to March 2026, on the basis of spurious reasons and in flagrant violation of Article 15 paragraph 4 of the Constitution, in order to prevent the CRM from having directly elected representatives, in the vain hope that it would not be able to present its candidate for the presidential election.

In fact, any project that ignores the facts presented above and yet claims to « contribute to the creation and maintenance of an environment of trust between the main electoral stakeholders » is a project that is inconsistent and out of touch. The United Nations cannot plead ignorance. They are fully aware of this ongoing situation, and the CRM has always made it its duty to bring to their attention acts of repression and other obstacles to democracy. It is therefore with a clear conscience that the United Nations is entering the scene, financing and promoting the fraud; claiming to contribute to the creation and maintenance of an environment of trust and serenity between the main electoral players, while endorsing the sidelining, from the design phase, of the major players in the electoral process, the political parties. In the art of incantation, can we promote inclusion by advocating national ownership of United Nations electoral programmes while at the same time endorsing the exclusion of the major players, the political parties, from the very design phase of such projects? While this sidelining of political parties in the 09 May 2025 project is suspicious, it should come as no surprise, given that the project was initiated at ELECAM’s request. Indeed, within the framework of the « capacity-building of stakeholders and support for peaceful electoral processes and social cohesion in Cameroon » project, designed in 2018 by three UN agencies in Cameroon , admittedly with the collaboration but not at the request of the outgoing regime, the United Nations still seemed faithful to the values of neutrality, legitimacy and integrity that it prides itself on. At that time, the UN electoral needs assessment mission deployed to Cameroon in July 2017 recommended that « the UN provide electoral support on (i) the establishment of a platform for dialogue and information exchange between ELECAM and all political parties … and (v) the overall promotion of participatory electoral reform. »

How can we understand the blindness of the same United Nations in the context of the 09 May 2025 project when we observe that the project conceived in 2018 was still being implemented until the end of April 2020, supposedly to establish « a peaceful environment conducive before, during and after the electoral process » (our italics). The United Nations in Cameroon is congratulating itself on the success of its project during the 2018 presidential election. But what about the post-presidential election phase in 2018, which has in fact become a pre-electoral phase for the legislative elections in 2020 and the presidential election in 2025? This was one of the darkest periods in Cameroon’s history, during which an environment of police repression and other serious violations of public freedoms prevailed, notably through the systematic banning or disruption of meetings and demonstrations by opposition political parties. There have also been numerous human rights violations, including: unsolved murders, including of prelates and journalists; the regime’s administrative repression and indiscriminate judicial vengeance against opposition party leaders and activists; and the torture of opposition activists in many forms: torture with bladed weapons with irreversible after-effects, electrocution of the genitals, point-blank shooting of activists with bare hands; the death of political prisoners arbitrarily detained; the regime’s refusal to comply with the Opinion of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued on 4 November 2022; etc. The United Nations is not only ignoring all these issues in the context of the 09 May 2025 project, but it is also coming to the rescue of ELECAM, the gravedigger of the Cameroonian people’s hopes of democratic change through elections. On the eve of a crucial election for which ELECAM excels in the engineering of obstruction to citizen participation in the elections, the United Nations is funding activities which, in the current local context, constitute at best diversion and at worst complicity in crimes against the Cameroonian people. The structural obstacles to the participation of young people, women and other vulnerable people in free and transparent elections are thus passed over in silence with the benevolent, ostentatious and assumed complicity of the United Nations. It is thus easier to understand why ELECAM was able to boast, in its press release of 15 May 2025, of « the constant commitment of the United Nations system to place its proven expertise at the service » (our italics) of Cameroon, since the UN turns a blind eye to ELECAM’s failings. What kind of expertise does the United Nations have in electoral matters, when it is not concerned with the effective registration of citizens on electoral rolls, but allocates hundreds of millions of international public funds to activities of questionable contextual impact, even though they are intended to encourage young people and women to vote? What kind of United Nations is it that looks the other way when the objectives of the projects it has already funded are not achieved? Why reintroduce in 2025, without the appropriate safeguards, objectives already contained in the 2018 project but which ELECAM clearly does not care about, such as the establishment of a platform for dialogue between ELECAM and all the political parties? Does the United Nations make a mockery of the recommendations and lessons learned from the initial projects? Otherwise, what is the UN doing about the « participatory electoral reform » recommended at the end of the 2018-2020 electoral assistance project?

However, it would have been possible for the United Nations, as part of the project’s support for strengthening ELECAM’s institutional capacity, which aims to « train ELECAM staff and officials to improve their skills in preparing, organising and managing elections », to teach ELECAM, for example, how to increase voter registration or how to publish the national electoral roll, etc. Elsewhere, we have seen the diversity of United Nations support activities for electoral processes, including: support for the preliminary planning of electoral operations and the drawing up of electoral calendars and timetables; support for reforms to the legal framework for elections and the reform of the institutional framework; support for the deployment and posting of electoral rolls in registration centres; support for the deployment of electoral agents and magistrates in the context of complaints and disputes relating to electoral rolls; etc. The United Nations has also been involved in the preparation of electoral lists and the publication of the national electoral roll. The fact that the United Nations did not do so is a deliberate choice that confirms their complicity with ELECAM and the outgoing regime. For the record, as the 09 May agreement ostensibly states, the « technical assistance … to the 2025-2026 electoral cycle » project is the fruit of the « strategic orientations of the UN Resident Coordinator in Cameroon (Mr Issa Sanogo) », of his « political leadership under the strategic guidance » of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Central Africa and Head of the UN Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA). However, in their successive reports over the years, the various holders of the latter post have constantly claimed to be calling for « inclusive elections », encouraging « the strengthening of confidence in the electoral process », « promoting the organisation of elections in accordance with constitutional deadlines and (the implementation), within the framework of an inclusive dialogue, of consensual electoral reforms favouring peaceful, inclusive and credible elections that preserve peace and contribute to the achievement of sustainable development goals ».

Cameroon does not need « technical assistance in electoral matters » in the form of funding for the industry of chatter and incantation, at least not a few weeks before a crucial electoral deadline and without the substantial participation of the major players in the electoral process, the political parties, in determining the themes that discredit Elections Cameroon. The political parties and the Cameroonian people must be full stakeholders in the process and not puppets to whom are sold hollow slogans under the flag of the United Nations.

We have not forgotten the interference of the United Nations and its regrettable contribution to the amplification of one of the worst post-electoral crises of the 21st century. We therefore call on the Cameroonian people to remain alert and vigilant.

Yaoundé, 23 June 2025

Maurice KAMTO

Candidate for the 2025 Presidential Election