Tension at MEC as police interrogate top official amid financial mismanagement probe
Malawi’s Electoral Commission finally emerged from a marathon meeting in Lilongwe Friday evening, hours after a tense stand-off saw police officers march into headquarters demanding answers over allegations of financial mismanagement.
The session, which kicked off at around 8.30am, was thrown into chaos when officers arrived to grill Director of Administration and Human Resources Yacinto Chikapa — with Commissioners forced to press on with their own business while the interrogation unfolded elsewhere in the building.
Sources say Chikapa was engaged by police for close to an hour before officers withdrew, allowing the beleaguered Commission to finally continue its deliberations undisturbed.
But one insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, didn’t hold back in condemning the operation, branding it nothing short of “harassment” and insisting the Commission had not even been given a fair chance to respond to the audit queries at the heart of the row.
The extraordinary scenes after it was revealed in news reports how a squad of roughly 11 Fiscal Police officers had stormed the Commission’s headquarters mid-meeting, sparking fear and panic among staff — with some employees fleeing the building entirely, unsure what the dramatic raid meant for them or the organisation.
Attorney General Frank Mbeta has since confirmed the operation forms part of a wider probe into alleged financial mismanagement uncovered by an internal audit.
“Fiscal Police are conducting investigations into the financial mismanagement and abuse revealed by the audit report. They were at MEC as part of those investigations,” Mbeta said.
Despite the turmoil, Commissioners pressed on with pressing electoral business, using today’s lengthy session to thrash out plans for the upcoming Nsanje South and Mangochi East by-elections, scheduled to take place sometime during the July–September quarter.
The chaos comes at a particularly fraught time for the embattled Commission, which is also locked in a bitter legal battle over government demands that it relocate its headquarters from Lilongwe to Blantyre — a presidential directive that remains tied up in the courts.
The long-running relocation row between MEC and the executive has dragged on for months, but Gilbert Khonyongwa, chairperson of Parliament’s legal affairs committee, admitted lawmakers have been left largely in the dark, with neither side having formally briefed his committee on developments.
“We are also just following it in the media,” Khonyongwa said.
Questions are now mounting over both the true scale of the alleged financial mismanagement at the heart of the police probe, and the suspicious timing of the raid itself, with critics likely to seize on the fact that officers descended on the building while Commissioners were actively in session.
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