Malawi leader lambastes ‘death of democracy’

Malawi’s President Peter Mutharika has accused the country’s Constitutional Court of attacking democracy.

On Monday, the court annulled the result of last May’s election in which Mr Mutharika was narrowly won re-election.

Judges said there had been vote-tampering and correction fluid was used to alter the results.

Mr Mutharika is to go to the Supreme Court to appeal against the ruling, which he says was “full of errors that needed to be corrected” and a “serious subversion of justice”.

He stressed it only related to procedural issues and not vote rigging.

The BBC’s Sammy Awami in the capital, Lilongwe, says it is clear that Mr Mutharika is not going to lose the presidency without a fight.

But the president also sought to recover ground from his opponents, who have claimed the judgement as a triumph of democracy.

Mr Mutharika thanked opposition leaders for bringing their grievance to court, underlining that only a democratic state would allow such a move.

But he attacked the decision by the judges as the beginning of the “death of Malawi’s democracy”.

Unsurprisingly the opposition disagrees. They have been celebrating Monday’s ruling as a new dawn for the country’s democracy.

But Wednesday night’s address and the upcoming appeal may have dampened that mood.

A Rwandan woman has told the BBC that her shop was looted in the Malawian capital, Lilongwe, in xenophobic violence that flared up amid political tension in the country.

She said that she and other Rwandans and Burundians had fled to Dzaleka camp outside Lilongwe for safety.

The violence follows the Constitutional Court’s cancellation on Monday of last May’s election results.

“We were expecting xenophobic attacks on Monday but we thought it wasn’t going to be this bad,” the Rwandan shop owner said.

She said the looters came in a mob and had taken advantage of the political uncertainty to attack foreigners and take their belongings.

Vice-President Saulos Chilima condemned the attacks, saying they were “unacceptable.”

-BBC