The Public Affairs Committee (Pac) yesterday swallowed its pride and admitted that government fooled them into stopping the planned peaceful demonstrations designed to force government to table the six Electoral Reforms (Amendment) Bills
\nPac had scheduled peaceful protests this week, with backing from the Malawi Council of Churches, the Episcopal Conference of Malawi and many other faith groups, but cancelled the demonstrations after government convinced them they would table the bills in Parliament
\nThe protests were stopped, a day before December 13 \u2014 the actual day of demonstrations.
\n Asked whether Pac agrees with the public sentiments that government fooled them into stopping the protests, Pac spokesperson Father Peter Mulomole said that they [Pac] knew what government was going to do.
\n\u201cOf course they have fooled us. We knew they were going to do that and they have done it. You saw how they messed with the bills like that of 50 + 1\u2026 the bills went to Parliament and as parliamentarians they have done what they have done,\u201d Mulomole said.
\nIt\u2019s been a betrayal, Mulomole said, and Pac board has to meet and agree on the way forward but this was foreseen.
\nHe also agreed when asked whether they made a mistake to quickly cancel the protests.
\n\u201cI agree with them and sympathise with them. As Pac we act on principles and not emotions so we had to be consistent. We were demanding that bills should go to Parliament and bills went to Parliament so what against at that time?\u201d
\nGovernment had grown cold feet to present the six bills, namely; the Constitution Amendment Bill, The Transitional Arrangement Bill, the Presidential, Parliamentary and Local Government Amendment Bill, the Referendum Bill, the Electoral Commission Bill and the Electoral Management Fund Bill.
\nBut after mounting pressure from Pac and leading faith groups in the country, government agreed with Pac to table the bills this week.
\nAnd true to that, Leader of the House, Kondwani Nankhumwa, first pushed in two bills last week and brought three more this week.
\n\u201cThey hurried with the bills to Parliament before the demonstrations just to stop the demonstrations\u2026 it was clever on their part we might have been outwitted but actually to be consistent we had to postpone the demos,\u201d Mulomole said.
\n\u201cWe were demanding bills to go to parliament and they did that and if we went on with the demos we would have been inconsistent in our agenda<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Public Affairs Committee (Pac) yesterday swallowed its pride and admitted that government fooled them into stopping the planned peaceful demonstrations designed to force government to table the six Electoral Reforms (Amendment) Bills Pac had scheduled peaceful protests this week, with backing from the Malawi Council of Churches, the Episcopal Conference of Malawi and many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":33701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57689","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\/57689","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=57689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57694,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57689\/revisions\/57694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}