An economist picked by Malawi’s outgoing President Bakili Muluzi as his successor and an opposition leader were locked in a close race on Friday following the third free elections in the southern African nation.
Bingu wa Mutharika of the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) was leading in the densely populated south but Gwanda Chakuamba of the Mgwirizano (Unity) Coalition was scoring well throughout the country, the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation reported.
”The two are scoring highly among the presidential candidates,” said the radio report.
Voters in Malawi — one of the world’s poorest nations -‒ went to the polls on Thursday to elect a successor to Muluzi, who is reluctantly stepping down after a failed bid to amend the Constitution to allow him to seek a third term.
Muluzi came to power after defeating self-proclaimed president-for-life Kamuzu Banda in the country’s first multi-party polls in 1994. Banda ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades.
Ballot counting began late on Thursday after polls closed but official results have yet to be released and the process was going very slowly, election officials said.
Malawi’s electoral body on Friday dispatched vehicles accompanied by an armed soldier to 13 districts in the south to force government officials to hand over final results of the presidential and parliamentary poll, an official said.
”We are not satisfied with the level of results coming in to our tally centre in Blantyre,” said Fegus Lipenga, an electoral commission spokesperson.
The opposition Unity coalition issued an ultimatum to the electoral commission saying that results from only two out of 193 parliamentary constituencies had been declared so far and demanding a ”plausible explanation” for the delay.
”The whole nation is waiting, we cannot wait forever… Don’t take the people of Malawi for a ride,” it said, adding that unless things were speeded up overnight, the coalition would announce its course of action on Saturday.
Some 5,7-million voters were registered for the elections in the country of 11-million people after a revised list controversially whittled down the number of voters by nearly a million.
A total of 1 254 candidates — 356 of them independents -‒ are vying for seats in the 193-member parliament.
Over 200 international observers from the European Union, Commonwealth, African Union and Southern African Development Community monitored the elections.
The leader of the EU observer team late on Thursday gave the polls a broad thumbs up.
But on Friday, the 14-member Commonwealth observer team issued a mixed interim report and stopped short of calling the polls ”free and fair”.
”The atmosphere at the polling stations was peaceful and we found no evidence of intimidation at the polls,” the leader of the group, said Tanzanian former prime minister Joseph Warioba.
But on the minus side ”we noted the serious inadequacies in the registration process and the inability of the electoral commission to resolve some important issues”.
The Commonwealth observers said they were also ”deeply concerned about the gross bias of the public media and the misuse of the advantages of incumbency”.
Warioba said in their final report, the team would ”determine whether the elections were free and fair”.
A former British colony wedged between Mozambique and Zambia, Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries, with an annual average per capita income of $210 (175 euros) and most people living on far less than a dollar a day.
It is also one of the hardest-hit by the Aids crisis, which has brought life expectancy down to 36, and ranks 163 out of 173 according to a development scale by the United Nations Development Programme. ‒ Sapa-AFP