By Cathy Maulidi

Barely five months before Malawi goes to the polls, opposition political parties still hold firm to their distrust in Malawi Electoral Commission’s (Mec) management of the electoral process thus far.

They say Mec’s continued disregard of their grievances casts a shadow of doubt on the credibility of the elections in September.

We interviewed Directors of Elections for the opposition political parties – UTM, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), UTM and United Democratic Front (UDF) – on their assessment of the process at this stage.

Each one of them has expressed dissatisfaction with Mec’s handling of their grievances todate and feared that the elections have been undermined.

In response, Mec says it stands ready to engage the parties on any concerns they may have.

For the ruling Malawi Congress Party (MCP), Mec has so far done an excellent job “in organising, supervising, and managing the electoral process”.

We have learnt that recently, opposition political parties again penned Mec chairperson Annabel Mtalimanja, demanding that the elections body should address their long-held grievances, which they believe Mec has been ignoring all along.

UTM’s Director of Elections Bright Kawaga said from the perspective of the UTM, Mec has not been sincere in its conduct.

“In most cases, Mec is playing hide and seek in the way they are handling election preparations.

“We have through the Centre for Multiparty Democracy and Democracy Works Foundation, had interface meetings to raise issues that we felt are absurd. Instead, Mec would tell this today and an hour later they come up with something different,” Kawaga said.

He said, for instance, they asked Mec to allow political parties to have an independent audit of the whole process of registration, considering that when they brought in the Election Management Device (EMD) they had agreed that they would give the parties an opportunity to be part of the process.

“They promised that we would be part of the process when they will be deleting the names of those who were registered during the pilot of voters exercise. Instead, Mec proceeded to install a new software in the system without engaging the political parties, which is suspicious,” Kawaga said.

He said Mec had also previously assured that the coming elections will be transmitted manually as it was in 2020, only for Mec to change to hybrid transmission.

“As UTM, all we demand is that we should be allowed to have the independent audit of the system, to have manually transmitted results and for Mec to be open for consultation as it was before [during Justice Chifundo Kachali’s time],” Kawaga said.

DPP’s Director of Elections, Jean Mathanga, a previous Mec Commissioner, shared similar concerns.

She said Mec’s moves to de