Electoral governance expert Augustine Magolowondo has asked political parties to invest in election monitoring beyond polling day, saying the exercise should be a continuous process and not a one-off affair.
He said this in Mzuzu yesterday when a four-member team he is leading met stakeholders to prepare political parties and their monitors for election monitoring and integrity ahead of the September 16 General Election.
Magolowondo noted that the state of preparedness for monitoring is poor because political parties consider it as an activity undertaken on polling day.
He said: “Monitoring requires advanced time for strategic planning. Oftentimes, you find that parties are last time doers in the sense that they are identifying election monitors at the last minute or they are failing to mobilise resources because that also, is an intense exercise.
“Due to lack of time, the quality of monitors is compromised in terms of competence or loyalty. Monitors are expected on the day before polling to observe, and yet when you go to the centres, you hardly see monitors because they see it as an event.”
Magolowondo said monitoring in the forthcoming election will have to take into account legal reforms and the backdrop of the court-nullified 2019 presidential election over irregularities and the subsequent 2020 fresh presidential election.
“What that means is that the standards of running elections in Malawi were heightened by the nullification of 2019 elections based on irregularities. So, they need to be aware that given the context and history, the monitoring process, if well done, can be an evidence gathering process,” he said.
Reacting to the observations in an interview yesterday, Malawi Congress Party secretary general Richard Chimwendo Banda said his party has confidence in its monitors.
“We have been preparing for this election for some time. We have well trained monitors across Malawi. They are ready to monitor the elections and we hope they are going to do a credible job. They will be deployed to every corner of the country,” he said.
But Alliance for Democracy national deputy director for resource mobilisation Tina Thole conceded that there is more they are yet to learn on election monitoring amid the fluctuating electoral context.
“We are yet to get there. This training will also boost our skills for the future. Suffice to say, we have identified our monitors for all regions but we are yet to train them. Some of them have never been monitors. We will soon prepare them on what to expect on election day,” she said.
In a separate interview, Civil Society Elections Integrity Forum chairperson Benedicto Kondowe observed that political parties have not invested enough in systematic election monitoring.
He said many times election monitoring is treated as a one-day ritual of sending agents to polling stations, instead of a comprehensive process that begins with the voter registration phase, continues through the campaign period, polling, vote counting and post-election dispute resolution stage.
The regional trainings are being coordinated by the Institute for Policy Interaction with funding from the European Union through the United Nations Development Programme’s Malawi Electoral Support Project Basket Fund.
The sessions are targeting 384 trainers of trainers from political parties participating in the polls to enhance the capacities of political parties to undertake comprehensive and systematic election monitoring and institutionalising reflective electoral practices within political party structures to strengthen post-election learning, reform and strategic planning.
