Long walk for honest politics

2009-12-30 09:28

Yaounde - A Cameroon opposition figure, Mboua Massock, on Tuesday announced that he plans to walk 1 200km across his country to press for transparency before and during the election of 2011.

"We've started a 1 200km walk to push for 12 pre-electoral demands," said Massock, 56, who is remembered as the leader of major strike movements in Cameroon in the early 1990s.

Massock, who announced in 2009 that he would be a candidate in the next presidential poll, will be accompanied on his march by an activist from the small opposition party he leads, the New Nationalist African Dynamic (Nodyna).

The pair began their walk, which is expected to take two months, in the port and economic capital of Douala.

Among Massock's demands are the "digitisation of the electoral roll," the organisation of an election in two rounds and "respect for the length of the presidential mandate," he told AFP.

The election is currently in one round in Cameroon and the president is elected by universal suffrage.

The current head of state, Paul Biya, 76, has been in power since 1982 and could be a candidate to succeed himself in 2011, since a constitutional reform of 2008 scrapped the limit on the number of presidential mandates.

Massock said the walk will take in the capital Yaounde and Ebolowa in the south, and "will enable us to go to seven (of 10) regions in the country to explain, from one village to the next, what we want."

- AFP