Election day is tomorrow and people are praying for a free, fair, and peaceful election. It is what we all hope for. But we hope for it so much that we may be ignoring a painful, sobering question. It is the question of whether a free and fair election is still possible after the extent of the Government’s abuses.
I will not recite the full litany of political arrests, seized funds, and public resources being used to fund Television Malawi (TVM) and Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) for DPP propaganda purposes. But I will remind us that the government recently admitted to spending over MK300 million ($2 million USD) of public, Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) funds to produce DPP campaign material in their effort to “paint the country blue” — money they said was spent to “civic educate people to vote for Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika”. Beyond the jargon, this means the government has been spending money out of the public treasury to fund the President’s campaign. It also appears that MBC has spent “civic education” funds to tell uninformed villagers over nationwide radio that “should they not tick the face of president Mutharika, their ballots will be invalid”.
Since such severe abuses have not only continued but increased immediately before the election, the only honest conclusion is that a free and fair election is no longer possible. There may be election monitors who keep the pretense of hoping for a fair election but, in reality, all they hope for is a “peaceful” election and the pretense of fairness is only to support their hope for “peace”. In the absence of fairness, they hope — and we all hope — that someone will be declared the winner and there will be no violence. There is perhaps some small chance that the people’s voice will still be heard and the most popular candidate will be declared the winner. But, after such a process, we are unlikely to ever know that this has been the case.
It seems that observing Malawi’s election is like much of Western policy toward Africa — success is measured by people not dying; problems that do not rise to the level of threatening physical life, do not rise to the level of international concern. Maybe this is a necessary standard for treating AIDS, Malaria, or food shortages, but it is an abysmally low standard for measuring elections. And oddly, this policy in itself is dangerous; it actually threatens life.
The West hopes to avoid another situation like Zimbabwe or Kenya. Why? I don’t think it is because of the fact that democracy was subverted and the people are now ruled by presidents they did not choose; it is because people died. Had the opposition not killed people or been brutally attacked for their anger over a stolen election, the West would not have been much concerned with the abuses. They would have done what they are now doing in Malawi and downplayed or ignored them.
There is a double tragedy in this de facto policy of caring only for life — of being people who are “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” (Martin Luther King Jr., Letter From a Birmingham Jail). It is a policy that puts the victims of electoral abuse abuse in a terrible situation; they must choose to speak into the world’s deaf ear or to kill and be killed so that their voices will be heard and repression will be called by its name. It would be a tragic irony if a mission to protect life refuses to hear any voice but death — if their only response to abuse is to try to disuade the repressed from believing they are abused and to blame the victim for any unrest.
