MALAWI: Public Affairs Committee is Pushing For Dialogue and Reconciliation, Says Archbishop Msusa
PAC Members (image courtesy)
In 1993, after the referendum that brought multi-party democracy in Malawi, a Public Affairs Committee (PAC) was formed out of different membership of the religious groups in the country. This included the Muslims, the Malawi Council of Churches and the Episcopal Conference of Malawi (ECM).
The purpose of this committee was mainly to check on democracy and to take care of issues of political justice and reconciliation. Should there be disagreements and imminent fighting among political parties in the country, then PAC comes in to mediate and bring reconciliation.
According to Most Rev. Thomas Msusa, ECM Chairman and member of PAC, the Committee is more like a watch dog for the nation. If things are not going on well, either in government or in the opposition, PAC would come up and speak for the good of the people and for the good of the nation.
“Since 2014 when we saw that things were not going on well in the political arena, PAC formed a task force called Mediation Team, charged with the specific responsibility of overseeing dialogue and mediation among political parties in case of contested outcomes of general elections,” Archbishop Msusa of Blantyre Archdiocese explained.
“I became part of the team in 2014 where I was appointed Team Chairman. We are seven people: three Muslims, 2 from the Malawi Council of Churches, and myself from the Catholic side. The seventh person is the Executive Director of PAC who is Secretary to the Team.”
Archbishop Msusa explained that as a group they received a special training from UN as well as a Civic Rights Group from Zimbabwe on how to deal with dialogue and mediation. Their first task was in 2014 when the country had a general election and they did their best to handle issues that rose during the time.
“This year before the election, we started by calling all presidential candidates to sign a peace declaration, promising that before, during and after elections they would abide for peace. The exercise was dubbed Lilongwe Peace Declaration and out of the nine confirmed presidential candidates, eight came and signed but the incumbent President refused to come,” Archbishop Msusa expressed.
During the elections the team went around monitoring the situation which according to the Archbishop went on quite well.
“It was during the counting of votes that things took a different turn: complains were arising and therefore before the announcement of the final tally we started to engage the stakeholders including the Malawi Electoral Commission. Of course, we all know what happened after the announcement of the final tally.”
The special task force formed by PAC has since been going around listening to the grievances of the parties opposed to the outcome of the May 2019 General election. They have also managed to reach out to both the opposition leaders, the human rights group, the Malawi Electoral Commission as well as President Mutharika pushing for dialogue.
Their intervention led to the opposition leaders taking on a more civilized way of seeking justice by letting the courts handle the situations.
“Of course not all stakeholders are happy with us, but as a religious group, we follow the democratic principles and also our own ethos, which others are not happy with. Some of these are similar to what the opposition are calling for and so the ruling party would say, we are part of the opposition; other times we tend to agree with certain things proposed by the government, and the opposition would say that we are part of the government; but this has not deterred us, we stand for what is best for Malawi and that is what we are championing for,” Archbishop Msusa who is also Vice Chairman of AMECEA said.
After meeting with all these people the group plans to meet again with the State President.
“We are going there again and hoping that the President will open the door and let us engage in discussions about issues of national interest such as governance, corruption, and other ills that people are talking about. We are pushing for a dialogue in order to enhance peace and unity which Malawians so much need at this point and time.”
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By Pamela Adinda, AMECEA Online News
