Youths should not be discounted. Supervisor of Elections (SOE) Mohammed Saneem said this during the launch of the Fiji National University (FNU) Youth Voter and Elections Education Project at the Fiji National University in Valelevu on Thursday.
He said youths did not take up senior positions because they were discouraged by the harsh scrutiny that accompanies the appointment.
People questioned youths on their qualifications and then talk about disfranchisement of young voters, but “it is because you’re turning them off”, he said.
“For a female to take up a senior position, she must have slept with someone,” Mr Saneem said.
“There’s no other way she could have got that senior position. For the young men to take up a senior position, he has to be related to someone, has to be of the same caste, religion, church.
“Otherwise, why would that person be in that senior position?”
He said a person did not have to be “old” to get the job done.
He said when he became the SOE, leaders of many civil society organisations (CSO) questioned his education, qualification, and “whether I was related to someone”.
He also said youths needed to be engaged now “because they bring into perspective what you haven’t thought of because you’re not a youth”.
“The head of IT in my office programming department is only 27 years old and you are currently benefiting from the most state-of-the-art IT services that the Fijian Elections Office (FEO) provides you.
“The 2018 General Election was the first time the FEO delivered silent results, they gave you results on an app.
For the 2022 General Election, a 24-year-old programmer in my officer, Dinesh, redesigned the software and now the software is the recruitment platform for all recruitments in our office.”
