President of Malawi re-elected following accusations of electoral fraud

Malawian President Peter Mutharika was re-elected on Monday, announcing official results Monday, standing in power in a vote marked by fraud charges.

The final count of last week's vote was released after a court battle, opposition leader Lazarus Chakwera, obtaining a temporary injunction preventing the publication of results about a purported vote-rigging.

Shortly after the lifting of the ban, the Malawi Electoral Commission announced that Mutharika, chairman of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (PDP), won 38.57% of the vote with 35% to 1% against Chakwera.

Fewer than 159,000 votes separated the two men, he said. The turnout was 74% out of 6.8 million registered voters.

The result is likely to trigger criticism from Chakwera, who has warned of alleged attempts to rig the elections and said the count of his party had shown him a long way ahead.

The electoral body had stopped publishing its earnings updates Friday after receiving 147 complaints from parties that had disputed Tuesday's vote.

MCP Chakwera sued for claiming that there were irregularities in the results of 10 of the country's 28 districts.

Opposition parties complained that numbers on many ballots had been changed with the help of a liquid corrector.

MCP spokesman Eisenhower Mkaka said Saturday that the party had turned to the courts because of "very egregious irregularities" on the result sheets.

Some documents indicated "the same handwriting from different polling stations several kilometers apart," he said, adding that there was "a lot of tippexing".

"What we see is a fraudulent election, the result has been altered," he said.

A disputed result

Vice President of Malawi Saulos Chilima also asked last weekend to cancel the results of the "serious anomalies" reported during the count.

The EU observation mission had described the election campaign as "well managed, inclusive, transparent and competitive".

But he pointed out that the tension upstream of the poll "has not been helped by various accusations of" rigging "".

Malawi has a win-all system, and in 2014, Mutharika won its first term with 36% of the vote.

He came to power in pledging to fight corruption after the "Cashgate" scandal a year earlier had revealed mbadive looting in state coffers.

But Mutharika himself has been accused of corruption.

Last November, he had been forced to return a $ 200,000 ($ 180,000) gift from a businessman facing bribery charges under a $ 3 million deal. dollars to provide food for the Malawi police.

At his last campaign rally, Mutharika told his supporters in Blantyre: "My priorities for this country are development and skills development."

Third place, Chilima, with 20.24% of the vote, was a member of the ruling party, but resigned last year to form the United Transformation Movement while remaining vice president.

Under Malawi law, the president can not dismiss the vice president.

The 64-year-old former Chakwera evangelist also ended in 2014, just behind Mutharika.

Malawi gained independence from British colonial rule in 1964 and was then led by Hastings Banda as a one-party state until the first multi-party elections of 1994.

The country, which has 18 million inhabitants, has one million adults living with HIV – one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world.