In Malawi, drama is said to be dead and buried. In their tributes to the good ole days, theatre fanatics salute the late Du Chisiza Jnr and his defunct Wakhumbata Ensemble Theatre as end of an era.
But the thrilling theatrics are still alive, except in politics and the politicians who play the so-called dirty game.
For the honourable theatre queens and kings, the country is a vast stage for the acts they play in people’s name.
The ended year has not been short of drama, which mostly panned out at the National Electoral Consultative Forum (Necof), the periodic talks convened by the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) to thrash out sticky issues in preparation for the 2025 September 16 General Election.
If politicians are not accusing the National Registration Bureau (NRB) of not adequately fuelling its power generators to register everyone aged over 18, they are hitting at MEC for the use of the national identity card as the only legal proof for voter registration.
During the first Necof held at Bingu International Convention Centre in Lilongwe, lawmakers from the North and South took turns, accusing NRB of forcing them to dig deep in their pockets to fuel gensets so that everyone gets the legal proof to register and vote.
“It is NRB’s responsibility to fuel the gensets, but we are being forced to buy fuel because if we don’t, eligible voters in our constituencies may not vote,” lamented Mulanje Bale member of Parliament (MP) Victor Musowa (Democratic Progressive Party-DPP).
The vocal MPs took to the microphone in quick succession, insinuating that the decried glitches could be a pro-regime ploy to sabotage voter registration in opposition strongholds while all was well in the governing party’s home ground–the Central Region.
This sparked a reaction from Dedza Central East MP Joshua Malango (Malawi Congress Party-MCP), who retorted that no constituency was spared from the national registration blues.
“Even I have had to buy fuel for NRB gensets so that my constituents can register, get an ID and exercise their right to vote,” he said.
That was in August, two months before the rollout of voter registration in November.
Two months into the exercise, they were berating NRB and MEC for ostensibly excluding the rural poor from enjoying their constitutional right to vote.
“You are privatising the right to vote because some eligible voters cannot afford to go and register for the national ID because NRB sites remain far apart,” bemoaned Nsanje Lalanje MP Gladys Ganda (DPP) at the second Necof held at Crossroads Hotel in the capital city.
Ganda and company might have been the happiest when the High Court Of Malawi nodded to some concerned citizens’ petition, ordering NRB to deploy its staff to all voter registration sites and leave no eligible voter behind.
However, the controversy over the constitutional amendment that makes the national ID the only proof of voter identity is symptomatic of a grave malaise in Malawi’s democracy.
It brings into question whether the MPs read and understand the laws they pass in the name of Malawi.
“Subtly, the questions over the use of the national ID raises questions about the calibre of people who make our laws? Listening to the issues they were raising, one wonders if they know their role and whether they really take time to understand the laws they pass in the National Assembly,” says political scientist Dr Boniface Dulani.
He is concerned that the MPs seem to find it fashionable in blaming MEC and NRB for the laws they make in the 193-seater House.
During the consultative meeting involving political parties and civil society delegates, MEC chief Annabel Mtalimanja explained that MEC manages elections based on existing laws.
Section 12 of the Presidential, Parliamentary and Local Government Elections Act requires eligible voters to present to a registration officer proof of national registration issued by the NRB.
“MEC doesn’t make laws. We can only work with the laws we have,” she said.
Section 49 of the Constitution says all legislative powers of the Republic shall be vested in Parliament, not MEC or NRB. Not even the Necof.
This is why people’s representatives in the House are alternatively called lawmakers or legislators.
Section 6 of the Constitution states:
“The legislature when enacting laws shall reflect in its deliberations and represent in its decisions the interests of all the people of Malawi and shall further the values implicit in this Constitution.”
Standing Orders, the rules of Parliament, require the Legislature to circulate the Bills to all 193 lawmakers 28 days before being tabled for debate in the House. The four-week requirement supposedly gives the legislators ample time to read and analyse the proposed laws in consultation with the people they represent.
Retired Clerk of Parliament Roosevelt Gondwe said this is one of the six mandatory steps in the rigorous test every law must pass unless it is passed without ammendments.
“Parliament is a House of procedures and every law must pass the strict scrutiny before being passed. The rules of the house abhor shortcuts. Bills are supposed to be scrutinised at different stages by different committees before MPs can vote yes or no,” he states.
Ironically, MPs now seem to find it fashionable to debate laws outside Parliament instead of gatekeeping and expressing their misgivings in the chamber where the Bills are supposed to be discussed.
In their whinning, they sound helpless as if they are minions muzzled under the foot of a monstrous giant.
Yet they are the ones who pass the laws they publicly detest and they not only retain the power to move the House to ammend them but also allocate adequate resources for NRB to do a good job.
In fact, constitutional ammendments was part of the review of electoral laws passed without any ammendment by the longest-serving cohort of lawmakers elected since May 2019.
While their six-year term lasts, they had better reverted to their role of making laws to further Malawians’ aspirations and constitutional values.
This not only entails consulting their constituents but also reading Bills to isolate chaff from wheat and isolate bad laws.
MPs are called ‘honourable members,’ because they have a noble job that carries weight.
So, they should stop acting like crybabies desperate for grounds to anul the next general elections.
In more of the same, a committee of Parliament recently turned itself into alarmists when they stormed a warehouse in Kanengo where they found NRB workers sorting IDs for dispatch to various locations and tagged it the hub of a vote rigging scheme.
Today, Leader of Opposition in Parliament George Chaponda has clocked three weeks and counting without giving the House evidence for the claimed rigging syndicate.
The annulment of Peter Mutharika’s narrow re-election in 2019 by the courts riled him to declare that the country will never hold elections everyone can accept.
However, MPs should stop being sensational as if they are hunting for the possible grounds for the cancellation of another election. Instead of all that drama, they should play their rightful role to create a favourable environment for credible, free and fair elections. This includes providing good laws as well as evidence-based checks and balances.
