By Njodzeka Kernyuy
Voting for the members of the Cameroon Bar Council and General Assembly has commenced in Yaounde, with lawyers anticipating the announcement of the new Bar Council President by Wednesday morning.
This will be faster than in previous years when Bar election results took several days to be released.
The voting process, originally scheduled to begin in the morning of Monday, July 14, faced delays and only began late in the afternoon, after some lawyers rejected electronic voting, prompting the adoption of alternative methods to ensure a smooth election.
“I think the elections this year will be speedy, but not as speedy as we expected, because what we wanted was electronic voting. And since the majority of the lawyers were against it, we had to improvise other mechanisms to ensure that the elections went smoothly,” Barrister Agbor Nduku Patrick told reporters at the Yaounde Multipurpose Sports Complex.
In previous years, Bar elections often extended over several days before the Council President was confirmed.
Barrister Agbor Nduku Patrick explained that delays were typically caused by the time-consuming process of verifying powers of attorney for absent lawyers.
“So, what used to cause the delay before was that we used to take a lot of time to cross-check the powers of attorney of known lawyers who were not present,” he said.
This year, however, these verifications were done prior to the gathering in Yaounde.
The lawyers expect to finalize the process by Tuesday night.
“Now we just got here, we registered, and then we began the procedure. So now we have already done the preliminaries, and we are moving straight to voting. We vote, we count and give the results, and we proceed to the next. So virtually, it’s still basically manual, but this time, we have tried to cut off some of those aspects that take a lot of time,” Barrister Agbor Nduku Patrick added.
The incumbent Bar Council President, Mbah Eric Mbah, who was elected in 2022 and sworn in during 2023, is seeking re-election.
A total of 15 members will be elected to the Bar Council, while two others will join the Bar General Assembly.
Barrister Kouanou Yves Patrick Kless, President of the Bar General Assembly, in an address delivered earlier, commended the lawyers and called for a fair and orderly election process.