Insistent Political Calamity of Malawi
By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront
The initial May 2019 vote had narrowly returned
incumbent Peter Mutharika to the presidency. But it resulted in widespread
protests. Military was sent in to curb the protests from spreading. Afrobarometer
in their research found
out that sixty percent of Malawians believed that the said protests were
justified. More than fifty three percent of Malawians said they agreed with the
key demand of protest leaders that the chairperson of the Malawi Electoral
Commission resign for mismanaging the election.
It was less than a year after, in February 2020, a
landmark ruling by Malawi’s constitutional court annulled the result citing
‘widespread, systematic and grave’ irregularities, including missing
signatures, duplicate forms, the infamous use of corrective fluid in voter
tallying,
and the Malawi Electoral Commission’s (MEC) failure to address complaints
before announcing results. New elections were ordered within 150 days. There
were scenes of the constitutional court judges arriving to deliver their
annulment verdict in February 2020 wearing bulletproof vests under their
robes. Although, as per some regional press sources, the Chief Justice also
complained to the Malawi Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) that bribes had been
offered to the five judges. Following investigations, the ACB arrested the owner of FDH
Bank, Thom Mpinganjira. As a reaction against the scandal, around fifty thousand
people gathered in Lilongwe, with smaller rallies in Blantyre
and Mzuzu. They braved the rain and stood for vigil outside the parliament.
As the court verdict eventually came, the fresh
polls on 23 June 2020 saw the coming together of Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi
Congress Party (MCP) and Saulos Chilima of the United Transformation Movement
(UTM) to head a coalition of nine opposition parties, who had fiercely competed
as the leading challengers previously. The new alliance travelled widely
to hold rallies.
Mutharika’s resistance to the constitutional court ruling had taken Malawi into an uncharted territory. Rejecting the constitutional court’s ruling, on March 9, 2020, Mutharika and the MEC filed an appeal to the supreme court.
Africa Centre for Strategic Studies found that Mutharika
had refused to assent to parliament’s electoral reform bills, and rejected the
recommendation to fire the MEC commissioners through a clause where he can refuse
to assent only once. Although, Mutharika was unable to call
upon military support as the Malawi Defence Forces (MDF) had moved to protect
protesting citizens and judiciary, since the 2019 election.
UK diplomacy played a subtle role in encouraging Mutharika to accept the
legal process. He was invited to appear at the UK-Africa Investment Summit in
January 2020 while also helping promoting early dialogue among opposition
parties.
Yet, in a kind of rancour, the Mutharika government switched focus back
to the Malawi’s legal system by attempting to enforce the premature retirement
of Malawi’s chief justice, only to be blocked by the high court.
It isn’t hard to assume, therefore, that the crisis
risked Malawi’s long-cherished domestic stability. A petrol bomb was thrown into
the opposition United Transformation Movement (UTM) party headquarters on May
5, 2020, which killed three innocent people. Ongoing protests, in Lilongwe, led
by Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC) which were largely peaceful, since the
announcement of the 2019 election have, on occasions, turned violent with
stores being looted and cars set on fire. Police stations and metro grounds had also been torched in some areas. Farmers, miners, peasants,
employees, retirees and university students marched and protested in Malawi throughout 2019 and into the first months of 2020. These fresh protests
heated tensions with police, but they didn't respond as harshly in 2020 as they did in 2019.
Edge Fidelis Kanyongolo,
a law expert at the University of Malawi, in an interview with Africa Arguments,
believed that the anger at the justice and policing system, ‘especially where
such systems are considered biased or corrupt’ have contributed to recent
instances of mob justice.
Police had arrested over two hundred people in
connection with these crimes. They have also been accused of sexually
assaulting around seventeen Nsundwe women, while cracking down on post-election
protests.
As per an article by Fergus Kell in Chatham House:
‘the constitutional court ruling had also changed Malawi’s electoral system, replacing
a first-past-the-post model with one demanding an outright majority, which
further encouraged the regional power bases of Malawi’s opposition to cast ego
aside and work in alliance with each other.’
It is also not the first time when Malawians had
rejected sitting incumbents. They had already done so twice before, rejecting
sitting presidents at the polls in 1994 and 2014. In the Chatham House
article, Fergus Kell further wrote: ‘ It is also not unfamiliar to see
public opinion and the judiciary work in parallel to uphold the constitution:
former president Bakili Muluzi was twice blocked from abolishing term limits by
popular demonstration during his second term, and again prevented from running
for a third time in 2009 by the constitutional court.’
As Malawi inherits a major balance of payments crisis, mounting debt, with no tourism revenue to fall back on, the new government will need to use its political capital to push for immediate reform. A spirit of unity and inclusion should be expanded, and focus must be on long-term recovery.
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