Remember when Tahirir Square in Cairo was echoing with chants of protestors? Well something happened before to trigger it. A small north African nation, which was buried under its President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s rule.
Yesterday, Tunisia went to polls. According to Al-Jazeera’s report, some of the voters were going to election booths for the first time in their lives!
African elections have never been easy for its citizens. Eruption of violence, foul play in campaigning, tampering with votes etc. have been very common in African elections. Once elections are underway, the masses live with the underlying fear of instability and violence. On one hand we can look at Kenya in 2007-2008, it was torn after post electoral violence, thousands of people were killed, women were raped and families were displaced. It took some time for the nation to recuperate from these scars.
On the other, Ghana represents the success of African democracy like no other nation. It endured military coups in the late 60s, but sprung back to democratic reforms, and conducted a successful election in late 2008. A close election which went to several rounds before the final decision was made. The Ghanians took to the polls fearlessly each time, and displayed the right of the people stands supreme. Fears of rigging were common, so journalists started taking advantage of technology. Every time a voting number was released the journalists would record it over their mobile phones and post it on the news website immediately.This vastly helped the observers to keep track of the first original numbers that released before they could be manipulated. Small forms of democracy led to a victorious elections in Ghana.
Egypt and most recently Libya have similar challenges lying ahead. The revolutions are just the beginning of the battle, the passion and patriotism of the people during the revolution should be used to fuel free and fair elections. Without them, the revolutions would just become any other event as part of our history textbooks, and probably given few entries on Wikipedia.
Voter turn out has been 70%, this is a good beginning.
