I won’t say I told you so

July 16, 2014

Here is the situation.

A losing parliamentary candidate goes to court because he thinks he was robbed of an outright victory after another candidate is announced winner.

Because the losing candidate respects the rule of law and exercises his right to seek court redress and does not engage in violence, the court orders a recount and the electoral commission obliges to it.

On the appointed day of the recount, an injunction is obtained in favour of the candidate the Malawi Electoral Commission declared as winner to halt the recount until a proper hearing, involving all parties, what they call in legal parlance an ex-parte, is heard.

As all the parties to the case humbly wait for this day, thugs calling themselves DPP monitors set fire to the building housing the ballot boxes and they all get charred, thereby ending the possibility of any recount.

Before elections on May 20, after the violence in the DPP stronghold of Thyolo, during a rally addressed by the former president Joyce Banda which claimed two lives, I wrote that despite countless claims to the contrary, DPP has violence embedded in its DNA.

That time I got hate mail from self-appointed DPP sympathisers, calling me names and personally attacking me that I have some pathological hate for DPP and that what I wrote was essentially rubbish because DPP is a reformed political entity and that it was not responsible for the murder of two people in Thyolo during the violence.

The same line that DPP is a reformed political organ-isation under President Peter Mutharika was repeated when DPP thugs tried to thwart a mayoral election in Blantyre two weeks ago, all because their favoured candidate was not on the ballot.

But this is the straight truth. No matter what the President and his handlers will say, reality will remain the same that there is a far right wing in DPP that still yearns for the old days when the party unleashed violence on Malawians and the law enforcers did nothing for fear of their jobs and Malawians lived in fear like in the old days of Kamuzu Banda.

But let us go back to the present case. It is only the DPP candidate and his sympathisers in the Lilongwe City South East Constituency who would be against any recount because he was already declared winner.

It does not, therefore, require rocket science to fathom it is such personalities that are behind the fire that burnt the ballot papers in Lilongwe to tie the hands of the court that was to hear complaints and determine the way forward only three days later.

As usual and to make matters worse, MEC is fumbling in the dark. Its first pathetic reaction was that this was a normal fire when it was clear it was not.

Apparently, perhaps after being told in the face what ultimate crap this was, that is when the commission issued a press statement, mumbling something still senseless but nevertheless warming up to the idea that this might, after all, be arson.

The question that honest Malawians and those that want to see a ruling party that respects the rule of law must ask themselves is this: Until when shall this country allow to be taken hostage by DPP thugs?

For MEC and the Judiciary, if they want to be on the right side of history, they have one course of action to take and it is to order a rerun of the parliamentary election in Lilongwe City South East Constituency.

This is the only way in which the will of the people will be determined. Failure to do this is giving in to the DPP’s law of the jungle.

This should be called a different name and not democracy. I won’t say I told you so.