Who said this will be easy?

I am surprised that people are surprised that the now May 20-22 Tripartite Elections had more voting glitches than any other we have had.

For a start, this is the first time that Malawian voters were picking three people for three different posts—the State president, member of Parliament and councillor at the same time.

In other words, the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) and major stakeholders in the electoral process had no reference point on which to benchmark or draw out lessons, best practices and challenges that would have helped them to plan for a near perfect process.

It was a learning curve for all of us; as such, the delays to supply voting materials that led to the two-day extension should be understandable to patriotic Malawians.

This is why I can say here without any fear of contradiction that the sporadic violence, burning of voting materials, blocking of roads and incidences of looting were all uncalled for, barbaric and the work of those who wanted to take advantage of genuine electoral setbacks to cause chaos.

Where I blame MEC is their inability to admit and clearly communicate the problems they were facing, including resource constraints, earlier in the election cycle so that everyone appreciated how hard it was to operate on inadequate and highly unpredictable fiduciary arrangements.

For example, when the media reported last December that the commission was receiving erratic funding which was affecting the electoral calendar, MEC released a statement, denying that there were problems with the flow of funds ahead of tripartite elections.

“The commission is assuring the public that all preparations for the 2014 elections are on course and there is no activity that has been halted or deferred into the future because of funding. Government has been releasing funding to the commission in time and has even assured the commission that funding for the elections will not be affected during this time it is implementing austerity measures,” charged MEC in a statement.

Well, if there was no problem of funding, why was the commission in panic mode days to May 20 when it was doing last-minute printing, for example, which should have been done earlier?

Why were there problems of allowances that almost prompted staffers to abandon their duties? If everything was going so smoothly, why was the verification of the voters’ roll messed up and eventually suspended due to what MEC called logistical hiccups?

And when it was reported that a vehicle shortage crisis had hit MEC largely because government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs)—which were supposed to voluntarily surrender the cars to the commission—were reluctant to do so, what did the commission say?

As usual, it went into defensive mode—I don’t know for who—claiming that everything was under control; that government would release the cars and in the unlikely event that the original arrangement failed, there were idling options to be applied, including hiring.

Indeed, I remember MEC chief elections officer Willie Kalonga gushing to Nation on Sunday that government was aware of the vehicle shortage and that the commission believed Capital Hill would provide the cars.

“The [transport] task force is doing a wonderful job. We trust that they shall mobilise sufficient vehicles as required. This includes the option of hiring where necessary,” he said. It turned out there was nothing wonderful about the transportation.

When voting day came, transportation of polling materials was one of the chief causes of the election delays—there were not just enough vehicles to go round and the commission had to ration their usage.

There are a lot of examples that show the commission was painting a rosier picture than the situation permitted and it has cost MEC and the country a lot of credibility.

Either MEC was masking its own inefficiencies or was trying to shield government against attacks of failing to fulfill its obligations.

Either way, embellishing the deficiencies has not helped anyone. If anything, it has hurt MEC’s image badly and significantly eroded the credibility of the electoral process.

The madness surrounding the results transmission and receiving system at the National Tally Centre in Blantyre has not helped matters either. It is a disaster and that is putting it mildly given how the situation has raised extravagant temperatures and anxieties.

The moral of the story is that it is always good public relations to accept that there is a problem and then explain how you are dealing with it. Trying to put up a brave face always ends in tears, eventually.

Had the public known whatever complications the commission was going through in managing the elections, the reaction may have been different.

This was bound to be a complicated process and it showed on the first voting day. Otherwise, I guess congratulations are in order to whoever wins this race—by the time of writing this, some people were still voting and no official results were being released. Although I want to believe that by the time you are reading this, the next president of Malawi would have been known, even sworn in, given how fast we are about ushering in our leaders.

This has been one of the most competitive races in the country’s history having almost gone right to the wire to find a winner who, I am sure, will not have amassed a majority vote and will rekindle the debate on whether the ‘first past the post’ system is doing justice to our democracy or it must be scrapped.

For now, however, we have to live with the minority winner.

All I can hope for is that the winners will celebrate with humility and that there will be no sore losers; that all parties will remember the peace agreement they signed and respect it to the letter and spirit.