With almost two years before the 2019 Tripartite Elections, the signs are ominous that those polls could face challenges from within. The signs so far suggest that the Malawi Electoral Commission seems ill-prepared to carry out the processes it is mandated by law or even those it has committed to.<\/p>\n
Already, time is running out for the Malawi Electoral Commission (Mec) to conduct biometric registration. Mec was supposed to partner the National Registration Bureau in the biometric registration exercise, but the bureau seems to have closed shop soon after issuing the first 5,000 cards in August last year.<\/p>\n
Equally ominous, if not baffling, is the insistence by Mec to defer the demarcation exercise of constituencies to 2020 to follow on the national population census which the National Statistical Office (NSO) will conduct in 2018.<\/p>\n
While the decision to wait on the NSO to deliver on the results has merit, it loses sight of the fact Mec could have used the NSO population estimates of 2008 to demarcate constituencies in the interim and then re-demarcate them again after the results of the 2018 population census.<\/p>\n
Further, the demarcation exercise has been on Mec\u2019s agenda since the last exercise in 1998, but the electoral body still seems to have been caught off-guard. That NSO would conduct the census in 2018 was known well before Mec greedily accepted K800 million in two consecutive financial years from the Treasury with the purpose of conducting the demarcation exercise. Why did Mec receive the money when it had no intention of delivering on the demarcation exercise?<\/p>\n
By procrastinating, the electoral body is playing with people\u2019s lives and their aspiration to have development delivered to them. Big and small constituencies are all entitled to equal allocations in the Constituency Development Fund, which places the bigger constituencies at a disadvantage. It is frightening to imagine that the CDF allocation of K18 million would have the same impact in a constituency of 5,000 people and another of 120,000 people. By putting off the re-demarcation, Mec is needlessly denying some people development that would impact on their lives.<\/p>\n
Mec has delayed enough and we don\u2019t believe this is the time for the organisation to start manufacturing excuses. We are past that and we don\u2019t believe any time is better than now. Mec should act now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With almost two years before the 2019 Tripartite Elections, the signs are ominous that those polls could face challenges from within. The signs so far suggest that the Malawi Electoral Commission seems ill-prepared to carry out the processes it is mandated by law or even those it has committed to. Already, time is running out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":42927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44560,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44557\/revisions\/44560"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}