Be the Mum in days of King Solomon

Honourable Folks, the May 20 Tripartite Elections have  invariably been described as “irregular”, “circus” and “fraudulent.”

They are all adjectives that make the current electoral impasse look like a laughing matter and you can  joke about, dust oneself and move on.

But a laughing matter does not force Her Excellency Dr. Joyce Banda, the outgoing President of the Republic of Malawi, to put to test the efficacy of her Executive authority by declaring the elections null and void only to be challenged openly that she doesn’t have the authority to do so.

I also think a laughing matter does not make the world train its attention on Malawi. The last time UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was heard worrying about Malawi was when the Bingu wa Mutharika regime slapped Tiwonge Chimbalanga and his fellow male lover with a 14-year imprisonment for celebrating openly their same sex relationship.

This time he has spoken again, urging for peace and calm as the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) sorts out the cryptic puzzle that became of our first tripartite elections in the multiparty political dispensation. His sentiments were echoed by the US and other leading democracies.

The reason for their concern isn’t hard to get. While elections give power to the people to hire and fire their president, parliamentary representatives and even ward councillors, botched elections—especially presidential polls—have triggered bloody wars in sub-Saharan Africa.

Malawi hosted reportedly close to a million refugees in the 1980s due to a civil war in Mozambique triggered by disputes emanating from the country’s first post-colonial polls in 1975. That war lingered on for close to two decades, claiming lives, maiming a lot more through landmines scattered in the bushes and completely destroying what was otherwise a leading economy in the southern African region.

In 2007, a disputed election result triggered a bloody war in Kenya and its aftermath is still hounding the republic to this day as the country’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and others have war crimes to answer for at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Shortly after the Kenya saga, Zimbabwe, too, tripped after a botched election, spilling blood in the process though the situation wasn’t anything close to what happened in Kenya.

More recently, disputed elections led to a truly bloodbath in Cote d’Ivoire for which the former President of the country was again hauled to The Hague to answer for war crimes.

The world is praying for peace in Malawi as we figure out how to get out of our quagmire without bruising our nose.

It, therefore, cannot be a laughing matter when MEC chairperson Maxon Mbendera and his team, working very long hours and under enormous pressure, had to use the entire statutory eight-day period, and even suggested asking the courts for an additional 30 days, before announcing the winner in the presidential poll.

Mbendera said by Wednesday, MEC had received 287 complaints and only 188 of them had been resolved, leaving almost 100 complaints to be resolved in the remaining two days to the legal deadline!

If you think this is a non-issue, consider that in 58 polling centres, MEC established that the number of votes exceeded the number of registered voters, indicating possible rigging.

When the dust is settled, there’s need to audit the entire electoral process to identify what needs fixing to avert a repeat of this kind of unpleasant scenario in future. Some have suggested that had we adopted the 50+1 system of determining the winner (contained in the constitutional review recommendations which are gathering dust somewhere within government bureaucracy), the way forward would have been a re-run for the winner and the number two.

As it is, there is simply need for the one on number two to make a big sacrifice for the sake of our country, for the sake of peace. In times like these, we can only pray that God may grant one of the major contenders (who may even be the real winner) the wisdom of the Mum who, during the reign of King Solomon, let the imposter take her child instead of sharing halves of a butchered baby.