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Topic Discussion II
Building Public Trust
Elections & Legislatures
Room 3
(15 of 23 pages)
Now to have transparent votes, this is a complex matter and it is in a pragmatic
way, and a progressive way that we would be able to solve these problems. But these pragmatic and progressive solutions
are themselves linked with standard of development of the country and the political awareness of the electors and
the political awareness of leaders themselves.
To give you an example, the political parties in Benin do not have a clear identification of their own programs
or their own ideology. We recognize the political party by its own logo, but above all, by its own leader. This
favors the vote in clans because it's not in the light of the program or the ideology of a political party, in
the function of solidarity of such a region that if he comes from that region, 90% of the people of that region
would vote for him even if he was incompetent, even if he didn't have a realistic program. Now to fight against
this phenomenon, I think we can only do that through civic education and consciousness and among the people and
among the responsible authorities themselves.
Another problem we had to cope with, was the balance of financial means. It is obvious that it is not possible
to ensure free choice of the electors if on one hand we have --
Chair: [inaudible].
Honorable Adrien Houngbedji: -- the balance of financial means. Again, it is not possible to have elections
which would be fair and just if on one hand we have political parties which have means, very big means, and there
are other political parties which do not have their own means. We must find therefore, solutions which enable us
and enable the various political parties -- we had thought the state could provide interventions but how could
we do this in a context, as I said yesterday, we have 120 political parties in a population of six million, how
could we do that? Even the national Assembly, 35 political parties are represented. So we have to think again and
again solutions adapted to the situations of our country.
Now access to the media, this is a reality in our country because we have about 15 dailies and the true impact
of these dailies when we know that 90% of the population is illiterate and that the dailies in question have 2,000
or 3,000 people in the cities and therefore the training of a good number of people has not been assured. Therefore,
I think very sincerely, that if we are able to have in Africa transparent elections, we could only do it progressively
and gradually. Thank you, sir.
Chair: Thank you very much. Now I give the floor to the lady in the corner. The next one after her, you
can speak.
Speaker: In 1998, the International Parliamentary Union held a meeting in New Delhi on the participation
of men and women in Parliaments. One of the conclusions of the meeting that new democracy is really a democracy
unless half of the population are full participants in the process, meaning women. I'm surprised after listening
to everyone, no one mentioned women in this meeting.
One of the issues that comes up often when we talk to women about their participation in political processes, whether
in voting or running for office, is that they lack trust in the process, completely. Some of it is because of corruption
and some of it because they feel marginalized even when they are in Parliament.
I would like to table a suggestion that it's important that when you talk about voter education, please look at
women's needs, not as part of men's needs. There are separate needs. Perhaps you should start understanding what
are the needs through women's' associations and try to enlist all the civil society that deals with women's issues
to understand what are women's demands and perhaps to start to be accountable to women so that there will be an
informed and reasonable constituency for the vote. Thank you.
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