I feel no remorse, says commissioner Mathanga over bastardised Malawi votes

Despite the  constitutional court cancelled the 2019 presidential elections citing massive irregularities during the process, one of the key  Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) commissioner Jean Mathanga told Parliament’s Public Appointments Committee (PAC) inquiry on Tuesday that she was not fealing remorseful for bastardised votes.

During the he May 21 2019 Tripartite Elections, MEC didn’t even try to cover their fraudulent election tracks — not bothering to try to hide their crude and wide-spread use of Tipp-Ex (a.k.a. White-Out) to change the tallies on thousands of results sheets.

But  Mathanga, a close ally to  MEC chairperson Jane Ansah, told the inquiry assessing the electoral body’s  competence, that has not guilt on her participartion and authorisation of the compromised electoral system..

“I am not remorseful,” said Mathanga, who defiantly justified  the appeal by the commission against the Constitutional Court ruling.

“What God is telling me is that you have done a good, I am convinced I have done a good job. I served the nation …I don’t regret anything. Things may have gone wronge here and there,” she said.

Commissioner Mathanga in her answers displayed impunity and defiance despite that the court  established  MEC were non compliant to electoral laws as no originals were used in the annulled  elections, duplicates were used, fake sheets and  tippexed sheets were used, in a number of cases no log books were used, presiding officers and assistant presiding officers never signed results sheets and log books.

Mathanga was appointed  MEC Commissioner on June 6 2016 as representative  President Peter Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Other DPP commissioners include  Moffat Banda, the Reverend Killion Mgawi and the Reverend Clifford Baloyi while United Democratic Front (UDF) has Yahaya M’madi and Elvey Mtafu. People’s Party (PP) is represented by Linda Kunje  and Malawi Congress Party (MCP) Mary Nkosi.

Last Monday, February 3 2020, in a 500-page ruling that took some 10 hours to read, Malawi’s Chief Judge Healey Potani detailed a litany of electoral irregularities, declared that President Peter Murtharika was not duly elected and called for fresh elections in the next 150 days.

But it didn’t stop there.

The five judges, Potani, Mike Tembo, Dingiswayo Madise, Redson Kapindu and Ivy Kamanga, ordered the recalling of the current electoral commission and further ruled that the simple plurality standard, used in every presidential race since 1994, was against the “majority” principle in Malawi’s constitution.

The  five-judge panel of the High Court of Malawi sitting as the Constitutional Court  called for parliament to amend the Parliamentary and Presidential Elections Act to require winners achieve an absolute majority of 50 percent plus-one votes.