INNOCETT MAWAYA: FACT OR FICTION? (Editors Pick) For many weeks, one Facebook Account under the name Innocett Mawaya has been spreading rumours that President Joyce Banda has assembled a team to rig the elections. Of course, the self-claimed whistle-blower never produced any evidence, but he has gained a lot of credibility in social media due to the intimate nature of the secret plans he was revealing. However, reading any one of his posts quickly reveals two things about whoever is behind the account: 1. They really hate Joyce Banda and 2. They must have sophisticated mechanisms for even hacking into phone lines to hear secret conversations at will. In a strange twist, Innocent made his last post just days before the election, claiming that the authorities were closing in on him to kill him for exposing a high level plot to rig the election. He even said goodbye to Malawians in what was intended to come off as his parting words before being martyred by the state for exposing the so called rigging plans. Then he disappeared, and his social media followers feared the worst had happened. Contrary to his claims, Malawians voted on Tuesday in an election that saw no evidence of rigging, and none of the ballot papers that he claimed had been pre-marked in favor of the president ever turned up as evidence. Even those who were passing on his rig-mongering as news on social media did not complain about rigging. In fact, many celebrated this morning by early indications that Peter, and not Joyce, was leading in the unofficial poll results being broadcast by Zodiak Broadcasting Station, results that were often being announced in a mocking tone toward candidates from Joyces Peoples Party who were trailing in the polls by wide margins, including the president herself. In a bizarre turn of events, the Malawi Electoral Commission decides to halt the release of the first official results, claiming that their computer system was being conspicuously slow and that certain parties had lodged a complaint about the tallying process. Not long after that, Nyasa Times, an online publication with questionable credibility, reports that the Police had just arrested a suspected official of the Democratic Progressive Party for allegedly using a house in Area 10 to operate a phone hacking machine to send fraudulent results to Zodiak Radio in favor of his party. Within an hour of that online article being published, the article is scrambled and unavailable, and rumors start to spread that Nyasa Times has been hacked. Unfortunately, the article had been read by enough people to keep its contents (which may or may not be true) from being circulated. As soon as it becomes clear that the DPP-discrediting article was not successfully muzzled, out of the blue, Innocent Mawaya reappears on Facebook, calling on Joyce Banda to accept defeat and stop making useless arrests of so called DPP riggers. He offers no explanation of where he has been these past five days when we all feared he was dead, but he spits venom to the effect that he is privy to all the secret phone-calls the President is having with people all over the country to doctor the election results. In this final act, he inadvertently exposes a third fact about his FB account, that it is run by someone (or is it a whole network of IT specialists) with DPP sensitivities. In this climate of intrigue, lies, spies, claims, and counter-claims, the task of separating fact from fiction is near impossible. We might as well be watching a Jason Bourne movie. But what is clear is that there are two camps clearly working to discredit each other by claims of election tampering, and whether these claims are true or false, they have been sufficient to solicit official complaints from other parties and sufficient enough to force the Malawi Electoral Commission to hold off on announcing the first official results, which may or may not be similar to the results unofficially announced via radio. Once the official results start coming out, one or both of these camps will claim that the Malawi Electoral Commission has conspired with the other party to rig the election, and who knows what that will lead to in the streets. In a battle where combatants have zero regard for the rules of engagement, nobody wins. In Malawian politics, what you see is never what you get. Shalom. By Sean Kampondeni
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 22:33:34 +0000
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