As the Biometric Voter Registration process continues there have been allegations that people have been ferried into different parts of the country to register for the November 17th elections, purportedly under the provisions of the electoral laws which has to do with ‘ordinary resident.’
However Albert Massaquoi Chief of External Relations at the National Electoral Commission (NEC) has defined the term ‘ordinary resident’ in an interview with Awoko.
Massaquoi cited section 4 (2) of the First Schedule of the Electoral Laws of 2002, which state that “A person’s ordinary residence shall be determined by reference to all the facts of the case and in particular, by reference to the rules contained in the First Schedule.”
Part I of the Act states that “ordinary resident in relation to any person means the home or place where he normally resides and to which he returns regularly after any period of temporary absence.”
The External Relations Chief explained that therefore ordinary resident means “where somebody resides, lives, sleeps and the person has properties or engagement with. So in our local communities if you have family home there, you are accommodated there, that is your residence that is what we refer to as ordinarily resident.”
However Mr. Massaquoi said “one thing that is important for the registration is that Sierra Leone is not doing diaspora registration so that means people are coming from all over the world to the country to register. Secondly, we have laws that made provisions for dual citizenship that is you can be a Sierra Leonean as well as another national.”
He added “we register within the country and all centers open within Wards. What has been obtained is that people come and they deploy at particular locations and prefer to register there. Though it is nice when they are ferried in because they want to give them the opportunity to register but if they are coming into the country they should look for areas that they have lived before to register.”
This process he said comes with its own problem since when lots of people come to a very small community, they register and participate in elections and they go as they don’t live there. “In as much as people have the right to register there are other people they have met so there is always this conflict.”
“Basically we as a Commission what we intend doing at the centers is that when people come in numbers we ascertain and we have sent people away who are not qualified to register that is by failing to provide certain documents.”
On the area of distribution of kits to the various Wards, the Chief of External Relation said “the kits are distributed evenly, we have 394 Wards in the country there are two main criteria in the distribution one is the population and the other is the distance between communities and centers.”
He added that because of the number of people that we have based on census statistics, “we know each Ward based on the number of the population that we have projected, that is the number of kits supplied. It cuts across districts, region, and constituency and Ward level. The second consideration is that there are certain Wards that may not be over populated but in between there may be about 13, 14 or even 20 miles, (and) because we don’t want to disenfranchise the people we look into these issues.”
By Betty Milton
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