With Malawi’s presidential elections battle taken to court, the country’s pollster cannot release the results until the hearings over an opposition injunction is finished in “reasonable time,” electoral commission chair Jane Ansah said over the weekend.
Ansah was speaking to journalists at a press conference in Blantyre following the injunction hearings held in Lilongwe on Saturday and Sunday.
The opposition Malawi Congress Party (MCP) took a court injunction on Saturday to stop MEC from announcing the presidential results of the 21 May polls until voting irregularities in ten3
7 districts out of the country’s 28 have been recounted.
The MCP is accusing MEC of allegedly rigging the polls in favour of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of incumbent President Peter Mutharika – the same accusations the party made when the DPP was declared winners in the 2014 polls.
At MEC’s last presidential results announcement, the Malawi leader led the poll with 40% (1,436,877 votes) of the valid ballots, while his closest rival, opposition MCP leader Lazarus Chakwera, had 35% (1,257,853) votes.
Since these results, there have been no presidential results released, leading the opposition to cast suspicion on the pollster, which in turn is insisting that all the vote counting is in order.
During the Sunday press conference, the MEC chair did not explain why it had deployed a legal team to the Lilongwe court to nullify the MCP injunction, saying the matter was sub-judice and therefore could talk about it.
“We are all waiting for the court to decide, as the court put it, at ‘a reasonable time’,” she said.
Meanwhile, a third opposition party – the United Transformation Movement (UTM) — has also called on MEC to cancel and re-run the elections due to “fraud” in the compilation of the results.
Responding to a reporter’s query on this charge, Ansah replied that MEC had not received any communication to this effect from UTM leader and Malawi Vice President Saulos Chilima, who is currently in third place in the partial presidential results with 651,124 votes.
Meanwhile, MEC has released the final parliamentary results, with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party having 62 seats; Malawi Congress Party second with 55 seats; United Democratic Front third with 10 seats; People’s Party has 5 seats; UTM has 4 seats; Alliance for Democracy with single seat; and independent candidates having won 55 seats – totalling 192 seats in the 193-member chamber.
Polling for the missing seat was cancelled due to the death of one of the candidates and a rerun election will be held soon.
NM/as/APA