AFRICA/MALAWI - Malawi prepares to elect its new President

Lilongwe (Agenzia Fides) – Malawians will vote tomorrow, May 19, for a new President and Parliament. The incumbent President Bingu wa Mutharika is the favorite, especially after the Supreme Court ruled that Bakili Muluzi, former President who was in office for two terms (1994-2004), can no longer enter the race seeking a third term.
“In recent weeks, the electoral debate has heated up and they've begun to make unrealistic promises, such as building a university in all of the 29 districts in the country,” Agenzia Fides was told by Monfortan missionary Fr. Piergiorgio Gamba who has lived and worked in Malawi for ten years. “The Presidency takes advantage of all the government structures for their own use. The government television station has used 99.9% of its programming to promote the President and the rest to attack the other parties. The MACRA, the group in charge of managing the radio and television programming has spent 300 million Kwacha to print material promoting the government majority party, in the name of “education of the masses.” The use of the government-owned media by the party in power has been criticized by the head of the observation commission in Malawi from the European Union. According to previsions from independent observers, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of Bingu wa Mutharika is destined to be defeated in Parliament by a coalition of opposing parties. The incumbent President is thus having to face leading a government with a minority of his own party.
To cool down the heated election climate, a Pentecostal group has promoted the “Presidential Breakfast.” Fr. Gamba comments: “This initiative has been an attempt to bring together all the candidates in the election for reflection and prayer for a peaceful outcome of elections. On account of the situation, only two of the seven candidates participated in the prayer. The religious representatives present included two members of the Presbyterian Church, a retired Anglican Bishop, and Archbishop Tarcisius Ziyaye of Blantyre.”
Malawi is one of the poorest nations in the world, however in 2008 its economy showed the second largest boom worldwide (9.7%) thanks to the expansion of telecommunications, tobacco exports, and a large grain harvest. This year as well, it is expected to see growth thanks to uranium mining that has begun in Kayelekera, in northern Malawi. 85% of the mining activity is owned by an Australian company and the rest (15%) by the government. The company has already signed three sales contracts with the United States and China for considerable amounts of resources which will not be worked on there at the site, but exported as raw material. “This mine is one of the biggest enigmas in the policy of the incumbent President, as the contract with the Australian company was handled directly by the government, which has even managed to silence the environmentalists who feared the pollution of Lake Niassa. The freshwater lake, 600 kilometers in length, in the heart of an Africa suffering from drought, is one of the country's most important natural resources,” Fr. Gamba concluded. (LM) (Agenzia Fides 18/05/2009)