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| National |
| EC fails to use donor money to change law |
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by
Pilirani Semu-Banda, 15 July 2004
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09:22:22
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The Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF), a German human rights and democracy body, has withdrawn about $50,000 (about K5.5 million) from the Electoral Commission (EC) after the electoral body failed to conduct a review into the electoral laws.
The foundation’s national coordinator Samson Lembani said on Wednesday the money, meant to be used in determining whether the issue of switching to proportional representation electoral system could be adopted or not, “was left sitting at the Electoral Commission for 12 months”.
Lembani’s disclosure on Wednesday came at a national conference to analyse all aspects of the May, 2004 elections in Blantyre following presentations that President Bingu Mutharika is a minority president as he was elected by 36 percent of the voters.
Asked to explain on what exactly happened, Lembani said EC chair James Kalaile approached the foundation to fund the review process of the electoral law in March, 2002 and that the contract to release the money was made in November of the same year.
“But the Electoral Commission had their own reasons for not going ahead with the process, so we have taken back the money. We know the process is important so we have still included the issue in our budget for this year and if the Commission is ready to go ahead we will give them the money,” said Lembani.
He said with the money provided by the foundation, the Commission was supposed to have hired consultants to find out the public’s views and to refine the public input in the matter.
“This was supposed to take not less than 10 months and the study wasn’t exactly targeting the 2004 elections,” said Lembani.
Commissioner in charge of EC’s legal affairs Arthur Nanthuru agreed that the Commission failed to go ahead with the study but that this happened because EC had other priorities.
“We didn’t have time to come up with a new electoral system as we had to plan for the elections,” said Nanthuru.
He, however, said the Commission spoke with KAF two weeks ago and agreed that the issue be taken up “soon”.
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