Nation gears for historic election re-run

Malawi goes to the polls tomorrow in a historic presidential re-run after a court overturned last year's elections and ordered a fresh vote, notes Legalbrief. Although there are three candidates, the election is effectively a two-horse race between President Peter Mutharika and his main opponent, Lazarus Chakwera. Citing grave and widespread rigging, the Constitutional Court in February ruled that Mutharika had not been duly elected, and mandated a new poll within 150 days. The landmark verdict made Malawi only the second country south of the Sahara to have presidential poll results set aside, after Kenya in 2017. A report on the News24 site notes that Mutharika this weekend said ‘we won the election in 2019 but the (opposition) went to court and grabbed the government from us’. A report on the News24 site notes that he won the disputed 2019 election with just 38.5% of the total ballots cast. University of Malawi political scientist Henry Chingaipe said Mutharika was unlikely to be re-elected. ‘I think that even Mutharika himself knows this and that is why he has presided over multiple schemes to prevent the holding of the election,’ he said.

'Malawians want the government to be responsive to their needs, top of which is addressing the perennial challenge of hunger and food shortages,' said Boniface Dulani, research director at the Institute of Public Opinion and Research (IPOR), which carried out a survey last week. Al Jazeera reports that other issues include better management of the economy, reducing poverty and unemployment, and eliminating corruption. Crucially, the IPOR poll also found that 51% of the 1 346 respondents would vote for the Tonse Alliance in the rerun, against 33% for the DPP/UDF coalition, and 0.2% for the third candidate, Peter Kuwani. Ten percent of respondents said they were undecided.

Hundreds of Malawian lawyers last week took to the streets of several cities to protest against interference with the judiciary after Mutharika placed the country's Chief Justice on leave pending retirement as the country gears up for a hotly-contested election rerun ordered by the court. A report on the News24 site notes that protest marches have taken place in the capital, Lilongwe, as well as Blantyre, Zomba and Mzuzu. As previously reported in Legalbrief Today, Mutharika's office issued a notice last Friday that required Chief Justice Andrew Nyirenda to take early retirement, 18 months before he was due to leave and two weeks before the country returns to the polls tomorrow. The move was blocked through a High Court injunction following appeals by the Malawi Human Rights Defenders Coalition, the Association of Magistrates, and the Malawi Law Society.

Tomorrow’s rerun, like that of last year, is turning out to be more of a contest between the judiciary and the government than between Mutharika and the opposition. In a Daily Maverick analysis, Peter Fabricius notes that the government and ruling Democratic Progressive Party have apparently also resorted to brute force to retain power. 'There’s been a spike in politically motivated violence against opposition politicians, human rights activists and journalists since May, with no arrests of those allegedly responsible. It’s hard to avoid concluding from Mutharika’s industrious attempts to neutralise the independence of Malawi’s judiciary just before elections, that he expects the judges to be called on once again to resolve the outcome of the poll. It is heartening to see a judiciary displaying such courageous independence in the face of enormous government pressure to kowtow. It is only in Kenya where African judges have shown the same courage, in annulling incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta’s election victory in 2017, despite similarly strong political pressure and even intimidation. Ideally though, politics should be decided at the hustings and not in the courts. When the political process is subverted, it is of course just as well if the courts are ready to be a safety net to catch falling democracy. Yet one can’t help suspecting that Malawi’s democracy will only be truly secure when it does not have to lean so heavily on the judiciary for its survival,' writes Fabricius.

Democracy brought relief from the excesses of Malawi’s one-party rule in 1994, but successive governments promised much and brought much less. In a Daily Maverick analysis, Lazarus Chikwera notes that politics became a test of ethnic and religious allegiance. ‘It was a cesspool of broken promises and false alliances, the preserve of the big man, the lengthy cavalcade, and endlessly vacuous policies. And then there was the corruption. While our founding father Kamuzu Banda had faults, he was not a corrupt man. There were no Swiss bank accounts, no apartments in the south of France. Aid was used to his people’s benefit, not for his short-term gain. He invested in agricultural systems, and in industrial businesses, not personal mansions. If Malawi will prosper, we need to invest in our people in the same way. This means we learn to invest in our agriculture, not in foreign lands. It requires us to create space for the private sector, rather than be trumped by narrow, vested interests. And it means making our country a stand-out success story for Africa, one that people regularly cite to describe as an African exemplar, a turnaround achievement.’ Chikwera argues that the longer the country’s leaders have stayed in power, the more they have been exposed. ‘Corruption has become the index of measurement, not governance. Rather than the ease of doing business, they are judged on the extent of the roadblocks and constraints. Corruption became the watchword, not sustainability. And then, when polls offered the chance of change, political subterfuge became the name of the game. Stolen elections became our national sport.’