Malawi’s Chakwera concedes defeat, ex-president Mutharika set to win election

Malawi’s ex-president Peter Mutharika was on course for re-election Wednesday after the incumbent, Lazarus Chakwera, conceded defeat in last week’s vote.

The dire state of the economy in the small southern African country of 21 million people dominated the September 16 vote, with Chakwera accused of mismanagement and broken promises during his five-year term.

Costs soared in the agriculture-dependent nation under his watch, with inflation reaching 33 per cent and the prices of the staple food, maize, and of fertiliser skyrocketing.

“A moment ago, I called Professor Mutharika directly to congratulate him on his historic victory and to wish him well,” Chakwera said hours before the election authority was due to announce the final results.

Even ahead of the announcement, “it was clear that my main rival Peter Mutharika had already secured an insurmountable lead over me”, said Chakwera, 70, from the Malawi Congress Party (MCP).

The charismatic former pastor came to power in a strong win at the 2020 polls against Mutharika, an 85-year-old constitutional law expert from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) whose brother, Bingu Mutharika, was also president from 2004 until 2012.

But Chakwera had failed to deliver on promises to create a million jobs and tackle corruption as the economy slumped, compounding the hardships for the more than 70 percent of the population that lives in poverty, according to the World Bank’s benchmark.

Almost as soon as results started coming from polling stations last week, unofficial tallies carried by local media showed Mutharika’s DPP had a strong lead.

The MCP, Malawi’s oldest political party, claimed however to have detected irregularities, including tallies that did not match and alleged ballot stuffing.

On Tuesday, Chakwera urged the High Court to compel the Malawi Electoral Commission to delay releasing the results, but the bid was rejected.

Chakwera said in his address that he accepted the court’s decision. “The anomalies do not necessarily mean that the election result projecting Professor Mutharika as the winner is not credible or a reflection of the will of the people,” he said.

The commission, however, needs to “provide a full and transparent account of the irregularities”, he said.

State of the economy

Mutharika’s DPP campaigned on pledges of a “return to proven leadership” that would fix the economy, including by ending in months a foreign exchange shortage that had restricted imports of fuel and fertiliser.

Voters who backed the reserved politician were swayed by the relatively better state of the economy during his 2014-2020 term, observers said.

He had assembled a strong economic team and brought inflation down to single digits, even though his tenure was also marred by allegations of corruption, food shortages and growing national debt.

“Malawians are longing for a better past,” said Mavuto Bamusi, political analyst with the Malawi Political Science Association.

In his final campaign rally in the second city of Blantyre, Mutharika said he was standing for re-election because: “I want to rescue this country.”

The vote that brought Chakwera to power in 2020 with nearly 59 percent of ballots was a rerun of an election the previous year that was nullified after the courts upheld claims of widespread fraud. Mutharika had been slightly ahead in the first take.

Chakwera “was a very good leader of the opposition and I think the expectation was that was going to translate into a very good and effective president,” political science professor Boniface Dulani told AFP.

“But unfortunately, if you look at the economy, it’s tanked. A lot of the things that they promised to do, they failed to do. And they have not even offered any tangible explanation why they failed,” he said.

(This is an agency story. Except for the headline, this has not been edited by Firstpost staff.)