Sidi,
I enjoy this one ,thank you for the posting.

for Freedom
saiks
----- Original Message -----
From: Sidi M Sanneh <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 12:36 PM
Subject: US poll fiasco draws cutting comparisons from African writers


>    NAIROBI, Nov 13 (AFP) - The fiasco surrounding the US presidential
> election
> has undermined the United States' role as the standard against which all
> other
> democracies should be judged, according to African newspaper columnists.
>    The foreign editor of Kenya's Daily Nation, Henry Owuor, predicted that
> the
> Florida recount debacle would stain the international reputation of the
> United
> States.
>    "Former president Jimmy Carter knows what this means -- his
Atlanta-based
> Carter Foundation will think twice before sending him (again) out to
Africa
> to
> preside over elections.
>    "Even the foundations run by the two top parties will henceforth be
> frowned
> upon in the same capitals (where) they once lectured election officials on
> the
> fairness of elections," wrote Owuor.
>    "For Africa, the losers are the pro-democracy campaigners who used the
US
> as an example of a just society. The victors are the dictators who are
under
> pressure to improve their human rights records. Already, Zimbabwe's
> (President) Robert Mugabe has ... expressed his delight at the goings-on
in
> Florida."
>    The fact that the president is selected not on the basis of the overall
> popular vote but by the all-or-nothing electoral college system, which
> determines the president on a state-by-state basis, has raised a few
> eyebrows.
>    Lucy Oriang', jumping the gun in Nairobi's Daily Nation on Tuesday,
> confessed to being "confounded by the fact that the man who won the
popular
> vote ended up a loser in a country that purports to uphold democracy, in
> other
> words, the people's will.
>    "But there is something vaguely familiar about the distorted logic of
the
> electoral college. Most African countries are, after all, ruled by men who
> came to power with minority votes, or simply rigged their way in," mused
> Oriang'.
>    Charles Onyango-Obbo, editor of Uganda's Monitor but writing in the
> Nation,
> sarcastically declared himself surprised that "Americans can go the Moon
and
> land a probe on Mars, but can't steal an election."
>    John Kitongo, head of the Kenyan branch of Transparency International,
a
> corruption watchdog, picked up the theme in the East African, published in
> Kampala and one of the most respected newpapers in the region.
>    "What do Americans know about elections?" he asked, going on to imagine
> an
> ironic scenario with the US polls being organised as they are in Africa,
> with
> African observers monitoring them and the CIA and FBI closely involved in
> their organisation.
>    "Opposition leaders would cry foul and the top leadership of the
> incumbent
> party would issue their own statement accusing the opposition of trying to
> rig
> the polls. ...
>    "Anxiety levels would reach a high enough pitch to force some people to
> rush out to supermarkets to stock up on non-perishables."
>    The African monitors, Githongo imagined, would eventually declare that
> the
> election "saw its fair share of ballot stuffing, head-cracking, bribery
and
> the like, but in the grand scheme of things, when all is said and done,
> (say)
> it generally represented the democratic will of the people."
>    This was a jibe at the attitude of the election monitoring industry,
> which
> in the past has shown a tendency on this continent to declare given polls
> acceptable "by African standards."
>    Githongo was also drawing a direct comparison with elections in
Zanzibar,
> a
> semi-autonomous state of Tanzania, held on October 29 and November 5 and
> widely discredited by the opposition and international election observers,
> some of them from ... the United States.
>    afm/gd
>
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