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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Mauritania
Index
To appease the demands of ethnic minorities and diminish the
role and obligations of an already overburdened government,
Taya's government hesitantly took the first steps toward
democratization and decentralization. In December 1986, residents
of Nouakchott and Mauritania's regional capitals, by then
numbering twelve, voted for candidates for thirteen municipal
councils. The municipal councils consisted of either thirty or
thirty-six members, depending on the size of the constituency.
For example, the Atar council had thirty seats; Zouîrât had
thirty-six. The councils assumed responsibility for local
economic and financial planning and for cultural activities;
however, as in the old regional assemblies, theirs was a limited
autonomy. In addition to the elected counseillers and
mayor, each council included an agent of the state with the title
of secretary general, appointed by the minister of interior,
information, and telecommunications. The ostensible task of the
secretaries general was to provide managerial expertise to the
elected counseillers and mayor, none of whom may have had
previous administrative experience. At the same time, however,
the secretaries general acted as representatives of the central
government and thus fulfilled the Taya government's objective of
decentralizing while maintaining national control.
Membership in the municipal councils was determined by
popular vote with universal suffrage and secret ballots. Locally
based political parties, some of which had ties with parties in
other areas and all of which included as part of their name the
word union, nominated slates for all or a portion of the
seats on the council. Debate dealt exclusively with local issues,
and a limit of four candidates represented the four slates
contesting each seat. The campaigns and elections in December
1986 were conducted in what has been characterized as a
surprisingly decorous manner, with between 48 and 65 percent of
the electorate voting. To its credit, the government refused to
inflate vote totals as is often customary elsewhere in the Third
World. In four of the thirteen municipalities, no slate won a
majority during the first round of voting, so a runoff vote was
held a week later on December 26, 1986. Once seated, the councils
elected mayors who, in every city except Nouakchott, had headed
the majority slate in the council. In the capital, Mohamed Ould
Mah, who headed the Union for Progress and Brotherhood minority
slate, won an unexpected victory over the leader of the majority
National Democratic Union slate.
In some respects, the election of municipal councils seemed
little more than a repeat of earlier, somewhat pretentious
attempts to bring the trappings of representative democracy to a
society unaccustomed to mass political participation. But unlike
earlier efforts, which were inappropriate copies of the colonial
administration, the new councils had organic roots and modest
aspirations. In light of the paucity of resources available to
the mayors and the councils, foreign observers doubted that this
experiment in democracy would resolve Mauritania's profound
economic and political problems. Nevertheless, the Taya regime
asserted that the elections were but a first step in the longterm process of democratization.
Data as of June 1988
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