By Sean Kampondeni
At the end of the 64th day of the historic Constitutional Court hearing on the credibility of Malawi’s 2019 presidential elections and the management of its results, I was literally left dumbfounded and with mouth agape by the answer given by Sam Alfandika, the Chief Elections Officer of the Malawi Electoral Commission
In response to what I thought was the most important question asked by Counsel Theu at the very end of an arduous five-hour cross-examination. But first, some context.
Sam Alfandika came into the poorly ventilated courtroom with a mission to sustain MEC’s cardinal assertion and argument in this case, to wit, notwithstanding the ubiquitous use of results sheets with overwritten alterations, tippexed results sheets, counterfeit results sheets, unsigned results sheets, results sheets with forged signatures, results sheets with unauthorized signatories, and improperly used duplicate results sheets
However, MEC still decided to accept these documents as credible results, against the recommendation of auditors no less, because in the opinion of the Chief Elections Officer and the Commissioners, a close inspection of the documents showed that none of these gross irregularities tampered with the “valid candidate vote”.
Now, Counsel Theu labored at great length and to great effect for the better part of the afternoon to discredit this position.
To do this, Theu’s first step was to have Sam Alfandika publicly explain what the proper elections procedure is as prescribed in MEC’s own procedures manual, a simple thing which Alfandika had difficulty doing, much to the detriment of the credibility of his own technical capacity, raising doubts about his ability to facilitate a credible poll for a college student council election, much less a national presidential election.
But Alfandika’s clumsiness at this stage was self-inflicted, for it would not have been Theu’s goal to trip him up, for Counsel was only laying the foundation.
The court resumes on Monday, December 2.
