Beehive Activities for UNDP

Barely 10 days to senatorial election in the country members of the National Union for Democracy and Progress (UNDP) are currently experiencing a beehive activity. Party strategies have been streamlined to secure proximity and confidence of many potential voters as possible before the April 14 voting day.

Since it launched campaigns last March 30, party militants, officials as well as candidates vying for the posts of senator meet at the UNDP headquarters in Bessengue on daily basis. "We deploy people to the field every day for campaigns," says Moselly Njebayi who leads the party list in the Littoral constituency. One of its strategies has been to address letters to individual counsellors and to present candidates to all municipalities in the region.

The UNDP list consists of 7 substantive and 7 alternative candidates in the Littoral constituency headed by Moselly Njebayi. Although there seem to be a dearth of work and party staff in the mornings, evenings are usually a time for the officials to gather reports from across the city, deliberate on them and make recommendations whenever necessary. Most often the headquarter gets functioning in the afternoon when a staff on standby starts receiving visitors. "We have at heart the interest of the population when it comes to voting laws."

Professor Ebanda René, one of the alternative candidates on the party list in the Littoral, says he makes reports of all activities of the on-going electoral campaigns and a weekly synthesis of all reports from across the Littoral. The goal is to come up a comprehensive masterpiece of the party activities throughout the electoral period. These will be forwarded to the National Secretariat of the National Union for Democracy and Progress. Updated programme of activities, he said, is distributed to every section and area of the country where there is a representative of the party.

Work at the headquarters and campaign strategies seem to be motivated by Party President Bello Buba Maigari's visit to Douala recently. Moselly Njebayi said their meeting with Bello Buba Maigari gave the kicker for a rigorous campaign towards a sure victory. Besides having spurred a spirit of determination and hope among candidates his message, they said, was full of encouragement, call for competition, conviction and congratulations for the hard work that led to the party's list being retained.