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The Electoral Commission has been accused of plotting to remove the Episcopal Conference of Malawi ( ECM), a grouping of seven catholic dioceses in the country, from the accredited list of observers in next year’s tripartite elections.
The accusations come after the commission wrote a letter on November 24, 2003 to ECM’s executive secretary Father Robert Mwaungulu advising the grouping to register with the NGO Board to “avoid unnecessary problems”.
“The commission would like to urge you to register to avoid unnecessary problems this may cause in the execution of your programmes,” the letter, signed by the deputy chief elections officer Willie Kalonga, reads in part.
But a resolute Mwaungulu on Thursday vowed that ECM will not register with the board because they are not an NGO. He said they monitored elections in 1999 in the same capacity and do not see the reason why they should be forced to change into an NGO.
“If they have a different agenda they must clearly come out—if the NGO Board has some issue with us, they should contact us,” Mwaungulu said.
He advised the Electoral Commission to stop dealing with registration of institutions and NGOs.
“It is not a matter of their competence. Their competence is in the electoral process, so we don’t accept to be classified as an NGO,” Mwaungulu said.
Blantyre coordinator for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP) Aloysius Nthenda accused the commission of looking at CCJP and plotting to remove it.
“CCJP registered under Episcopal Conference and of course we know that’s what they [EC] are now driving at when they talk about registration. We still remain a church organisation,” he said
But yesterday, Kalonga backtracked from the letter. He said it was a mistake on the part of the commission to write the Episcopal Conference.
“If the Episcopal Conference is not registered then, we sent the letter in error because we had assumed that we were sending to NGOs. So if they are not they should just disregard it and note that we had accredited service providers and NGOs,” he explained.
Kalonga dismissed fears that ECM was going to be removed if it fails to register with the NGO Board.
“Even in the letter we are not saying that we will remove them, I mean that’s not the case,” he said.
NGO Board chairman Jarvis Chakumodzi on Thursday said he was not aware of the letter to have the ECM register as an NGO.
“In as far as I know Episcopal Conference of Malawi and the Christian Council of Churches are not NGOs. They are civil society and, therefore, they do not need to be registered,” he said.
But the Electoral Commission claimed in its letter that it was advised by the NGO Board to ask ECM to register with the board as required by law.
When Parliament enacted into law the setup of the NGO Board in 2001, there was widespread criticism from rights groups who described it as political.
Civil society groups feared that the new body was going to be a political tool meant to deregister aggressive NGOs perceived to be working against government.
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