THE CURSE OF MALAWI’S MANY POLITICAL PARTIES.

Article first appeared in January 2014, in The Sunday Times

There is no denying that political parties play a very important part in any democratic system. For example political parties offer the voters with options on who to vote for, depending on what principles the parties stand for.

In a normal democratic system, political parties are supposed to develop policies and programs which they are supposed to offer the public to choose from. The policies and programs are supposed to reflect the demands of the general public. The fact that in a society we cannot all have similar demands, provides room for conflicting demands hence necessitating the need for alternative policy positions. This is where political parties become handy in a democracy.

The role of the political party in a democracy can thus not be overlooked.

However, in as much as the political party is important, too many political parties can be harmful to a democracy like ours. In a country where we have so many parties, most of those who do not even have a single policy statement to stand by,  the only role that our many political parties can play is to confuse the electorate and lead to a less favoured candidate to win.

In fact, some of the political parties only exist to divide their opponents vote. This in my opinion is the main reason why we have many political parties mushrooming as we get closer to the elections. It is my opinion that  as a country we need to move fast to protect our interests  by coming up with an enabling legislation to control how we come up with political parties and which parties should be allowed to participate in an election.

In as much as people have a constitutional right to form or join a political grouping of their choice,  it would be important to set a minimum standard as to which parties must be allowed to contest an election. For instance, it would make a lot of sense if MEC would set up a minimum standard on the period that a political party is supposed to exist before it can be allowed to participate in an election. In my view, such a period should not be less than 4 years since the last general election.

Such a standard, would allow MEC to  have a well defined number of players in the next election. This would allow for better planning and reduce resource wastage.

Allowing only the proven and established parties to contest in an election would allow Malawians to vote for credible leaders whose policy positions have been evaluated by the voters over a period of time and not only in a few months.  The current set up where a person can just wake up and form a political party less than five months to an election and be allowed to contest is in my view the greatest blight to Malawi’s democracy.

Voters are given a raw deal, Suddenly MEC has to plan to reach out to more parties than they should have. Suddenly a political party that was supposed to be in the fore front or even expected to win the elections is hit by massive defections to the new and smaller party – Usually defections planned by the rival party to weaken its opposition. And, if that cannot be tactical rigging, what else would be.

Our electoral law needs to be strengthened to allow MEC being a key player in the elections, to flush out opportunism in the electoral process by rejecting those parties which, based on an established criteria have been deemed as having no policy footing. All parties that just mushroom on the eve of the elections must be rejected as distracters and be advised to contest the next election.

Equally, the electoral law must mandate the registrar of political parties to refuse to register any political parties whose policies are framed within an ideology of an existing party.  New political parties  in my view must offer the electorate with alternative policy positions hence there is no need to register a party whose policies do not offer any alternative to the policies that are already in existence.

The many political parties existing in Malawi albeit without ideologies are not an expression of freedom. Neither are they a blessing to Malawian, these parties are a curse that need to be flushed out of the electoral calendar until such a time they tell us what they really stand for.