MEC upbeat on national ID use in 2025 polls
Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) has expressed optimism that existing challenges being faced by the electorate to access the national identity card (ID) will be resolved to enable them register and vote during the 2025 General Elections.
MEC chairperson Chifundo Kachale said this on Friday in Mangochi at the opening of Malawi Law Society (MLS) 2024 annual general meeting (AGM) and conference.
He said this in the wake of concerns raised by some stakeholders about the availability of the national IDs due to capacity challenges at National Registration Bureau (NRB).
Kachale, a judge of the High Court of Malawi, said: “We remain confident that there is adequate time to remedy whatever capacity gaps might exist in so far as access to those critical documents in so far as the exercise of the franchise for our citizens is concerned.”
He said MEC has recently taken some measures to remain faithful to the responsibilities underscored in the jurisprudence of February and May 2020 by the Constitutional Court as well as the Malawi Supreme Court of Appeal.
The responsibilities being referred to include the fact that the commission cannot vary legal provisions out of mere logistical or other technical expediency.
Kachale said in the Karonga by-elections scheduled for tomorrow, some MEC officers registered people by relying upon the registration application slips as evidence that the person had been to NRB and is waiting for the actual ID card.
“The commission expunged the names of those intended voters from the register and even took administrative measures to ensure that our staff will carry out the electoral processes in fidelity to the law as explained to them in the relevant training manuals,” he said.
There has been a legal amendment in the electoral law which now requires a person to produce proof of registration with NRB in order to register as a voter. Previously, the law allowed one to produce either a passport, drivers licence or some written proof from your chief in order to register as a voter.
“The particular mischief this change in law was meant to address was the reliability and validity of the documents which were used to verify the age as well as identity of the prospective voter,” said Kachale.
In his remarks, MLS president Patrick Mpaka said the Constitutional Court pronounced that the country’s five-year electoral cycle was a national strategy to facilitate the escape of the electorate from difficulties of hunger, disease, poverty, substandard public health facilities and poor road infrastructure, among others.
He said: “The question that we ask in this conference, therefore, is: Is this national strategy working at all? Is it worth the ordinary people’s time next year?
“Since 1994, we have engaged this strategy for six times in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2020. Thirty years down the line, are we able to say without flickering an eyelid the health, happiness, and fortunes and material wellbeing of the people of Malawi as persons or as a group is improving?”
The AGM, which closed on Saturday, was held under the theme ‘Interrogating the Malawi electoral system towards 2025 Tripartite Elections’.
