FEAR REDUCED OPPOSITION VOTE TO 26%
Despite the low turn out, the incumbent Jean-François Ferrari of the SNP captured 87% of the total votes cast against DP’s Frank Elizabeth who polled 13%. The bye-election was triggered by the resignation of Ferrari who wanted it to be a referendum on the ruling party, the SPPF which he accused of stifling freedom of speech in the National Assembly. With the SPPF not taking part, however, it remains to be seen how SNP will interpret the result.
The DP leader Paul Chow had said that the poll would be a referendum on Ferrari rather than the SPPF. The collapse of the opposition vote must now be of serous concern to SNP. As the DP vote is greater than the majority (64) Ferrari obtained in the general election of 2007 with the support of the DP, it is evident that in a three corner contest SPPF would win in a first past the post electoral system for the National Assembly. For the DP the result has put the party in a stronger bargaining position in terms of any future electoral arrangement with SNP, both for the presidential as well as assembly elections. It also shows that, had the DP contested the 2007 elections in it’s own name, SNP would not have been able to win in Les Mamelles and Bel Ombre as well as Mont Fleuri, thereby giving the SPPF a two thirds majority.
The result must be viewed against a concerted effort by the ruling party, the SPPF, to orchestrate a boycott of the vote through threats, intimidation as well as cash incentives to poor households on the day of the election itself, for voters not to turn up. The fear of losing the goodwill of the SPPF patronage system clearly worked, especially among those who are employees of the government as 500 opposition voters failed to turn up to vote this time around. This was also born out by the fact that no one among the election officials who were on the voters’ roll of the district cast a vote. All of them are employees of the government.
The SPPF threats were given credence by the SNP activists who, unwittingly, spread the fears in the government housing estates where most families live on or below the poverty line – which the National Statistics Bureau (NSB) has determined is the ability of a household being able to spend R834 per person per month based on 1999-2000 prices. According to NSB 19% of the population was living on or below the poverty line at the time of their survey. In Mont Fleuri, according to our assessment, this figure is likely to be in excess of 50% of all households, where a large number of the men are part-time employees at the tuna port unloading tuna earning an average of R1000 per month while their families survive on a meagre social security handout.
Despite an official protest from the DP leader who urged the Electoral Commissioner to denounce the SPPF for suggesting in a press release on nomination day that voters should boycott the election and SBC for broadcasting the exhortation through its broadcasting media, no action was taken. To date the electoral commissioner, Hendricks Gappy has not even acknowledged receipt of Chow’s letter nor indicated that he treated the complaint seriously. Unlike during the general election of 2007 when the state broadcasting media exhorted the electorate in voter education advertisements on television and radio, issued by the office of the electoral commissioner, this time there were no similar adverts.
Indeed, Gappy and the SBC management threw cold water on a proposal by Chow that the two candidates should appear on at least one phone-in programme on SBC’s FM station so that the voters of Mont Fleuri could question them about their plans. Instead, Gappy and the SBC management wanted to restrict party political broadcast to only one broadcast of 6 minutes throughout the two weeks of the official campaign. It was only at the insistence of Chow that they agreed on two slots of 6 minutes.
The entire state broadcasting media was out of bounds to the two candidates or political parties during the entire two weeks period so that the issues behind the election were left to the candidates themselves to be put to the electorate in 12 minutes. The state owned daily newspaper Seychelles Nation ignored the election entirely except for publishing a so-called “reader’s” letter rubbishing the idea of a bye-election. Instead SBC’s head of programmes Antoine Onezime and the Seychelles Nation editor used the occasion of the evening of the result to argue with Jean-François Ferrari, the winning candidate on the significance of the result. This showed the contempt the government controlled by the SPPF has for public opinion.