Accountability for 2025 election processes
Elections affect the economy, the politics and the status of people’s social life. Elections determine the direction of a country through the type of leaders that are put in place. Therefore, electoral integrity is central to national development. However, electoral malpractices are bound to happen all the time. Corruption, abuse and malpractices that are currently happening could have the effect of compromising the integrity of 2025 election in Malawi.
Recently, there has been reported incidence of political violence in Bangwe Township of Blantyre. Violence is a tactic used by political actors to intimidate voters and force them to make political choices out of fear. If not tamed at this early stage, political violence will negatively affect the 2025 elections.
Economic mismanagement is another tool used as a subtle means for rigging an election well in advance of the polling day. Politicians often create a false sense of desperateness in the people. Political elites deliberately create chaos which they will later benefit from. Rural and urban voters feeling the pinch of abject poverty and hunger are manipulated to believe that the politician is the messiah to deliver them from the fiery furnace of economic doldrums.
Malawi is currently experiencing sharp rise in prices of basic goods and services. The 2025 election is already being rigged through increases in the price of maize which has reached unbearable level of K25 000 per 50 kilogrammes bag. Admarc has been incapacitated. The political elite will benefit from distributing food handouts to the hungry voters during campaign. Meanwhile, inflation continues to rise. Prices of many basics are no longer affordable and that is just how the 2025 vote is secretly being stolen.
The stage is set for a protracted food crisis through the tactical mismanagement of the fertilizer procurement. Recent developments surrounding the Affordable Inputs Program (AIP) appear to be a well-orchestrated, well planned, and well-rehearsed ploy to rig the 2025 elections. The chaos on AIP appear to be deliberate and premeditated. It is mindboggling just to think how and why an entire Ministry of Agriculture would connive with SFFRFM to act mafia and siphon millions of kwacha to suppliers with dubious record to deliver fertilizers.
During the last growing season, government sent troops of ministers to all corners of the world in search for fertiliser when that is the role of technocrats. Dispatching Cabinet ministers on such errands is an abuse of tax payers’ money and it is just how subtly the 2025 election is being rigged. Next time we will not be surprised to learn that the ministers were sent on an errand to search for suppliers of ballot papers.
International trips have populated the presidential diary that one wonders where State House is getting the money and the forex while the economy is bleeding. Such a concentration of foreign travels by the Chakwera administration could be a fundraising gimmick where MCP and Tonse could be collecting money to finance its next campaign. It could be a tactical strategy for rigging the election before 2025.
The opposition parties too are doing their part in rigging the 2025 elections. One wonders why the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is wasting time with leadership wrangles at a time the party should have been providing checks and balances on the ruling Tonse government.
The dead silence by civil society activists in the face of serious corruption and abuse is another pointer towards rigging of 2025 polls. Some activists under HRDC were systematically silenced and sent to embassies abroad.
On another note, we are yet to see the impact of relocation of MEC offices from Blantyre to Lilongwe, on electoral transparency and accountability.
