The EconomistFebruary 8th 2020 Middle East & Africa 39T
here aremany ways to rig an election.
Voters can be beaten or bribed. Ballot
boxes can be stuffed. Computers tallying
results can be hacked. But few methods are
more rudimentary than that used last year
in Malawi’s general election. In the south-
ern African country of 18m people the das-
tardly tool was Tipp-Ex, the correction flu-
id that has saved many a teenager’s
error-strewn homework.
On May 27th the Malawi Electoral Com-
mission (mec) announced a victory for the
79-year-old incumbent president, Peter
Mutharika. The mecsaid it had received 147
reports of “irregularities”, including the
use of Tipp-Ex on results sheets, but re-
fused to call for another vote. Opposition
candidates petitioned the country’s consti-
tutional court, asking judges to nullify the
election. Protesters, many of them young
Malawians born after the end of dictator-
ship in 1994, took to the streets to keep up
the pressure on the bench.
It worked. On February 3rd the court
said there had been “widespread, system-
atic and grave” flaws in the electoral pro-
cess. It ordered a re-run of the general elec-
tion to be held within 150 days. For months
millions of Malawians have followed the
twists and turns of the case live on radio
broadcasts—but few could have hoped for
such a decisive verdict.
The judgment is a historic moment for
one of the world’s poorest countries. In-
come per person is just $389 a year accord-
ing to the World Bank, a quarter of the
amount in neighbouring Zambia. The
flawed democracy that replaced the one-
man rule of Hastings Banda has done much
to enrich an elite, but little to lift the vast
majority out of poverty. The hope is that the
court’s verdict ushers in a new era in which
politicians must govern well rather than
cheat to stay in power.
Malawi’s case matters beyond its bor-
ders. African courts and international elec-
tion observers have a history of accepting
suspicious results. Last year, for example,
the constitutional court in the Democratic
Republic of Congo affirmed that Félix Tshi-
sekedi had won the presidency fairly de-
spite bucketloads of evidence to the con-
trary. Regional political organisations have
proved similarly short of backbone. The in-
vertebrate Southern African Development
Community quickly endorsed Malawi’s
election, echoing its hurried acceptance of
Zimbabwe’s iffy count in 2018.
A single verdict will change only so
much. But the Malawian judgment follows
that of Kenya’s Supreme Court, which in
2017 declared void the victory of President
Uhuru Kenyatta. “Two African courts have
now set tougher standards for elections
than international election observers,”
says Nic Cheeseman, an expert in African
politics at the University of Birmingham.
In doing so they have made it a little more
difficult for politicians to rig elections.
Malawians will hope that the aftermathof their historic court verdict is smoother
than it was in Kenya. Raila Odinga, Kenya’s
main opposition leader, boycotted the re-
run, citing yet more irregularities. In Mala-
wi there are obstacles to a clean and peace-
ful second vote: the mecwill need new
leadership, and Mr Mutharika says he will
appeal the court’s decision.
For now, though, Malawians are proud
that the rule of law has prevailed. The ver-
dict shows that though Tipp-Ex may hide
the truth, it cannot erase it.^7LILONGWE
For the second time in African history,
judges nullify a flawed general election
Malawi
Let’s do this again
I
n 2018 adatingappwaslaunched
targeting African diasporas in America.
CultureCrush was described by its foun-
der as an “inclusive ecosystem”. And if
that were not romantic enough, the app
promised to be the first to allow users
looking for love to search mates by “na-
tionality, ethnicity and tribe”.
For lonely hearts in Chicago or New
York it may well be a useful feature. But
in Africa, love, or at least marriage, is
increasingly transcending ethnic bound-
aries. That is according to several studies
published in the past two years, all of
which find that it is becoming more
common for Africans to get hitched to
partners from other groups.
A paper published in January by
Juliette Crespin-Boucaud of the Paris
School of Economics found that the
share of marriages that are “interethnic”
ranges from 10% of the total in Burkina
Faso to 46% in Zambia. The average share
in the 15 countries she looked at is 20%.
Another study, published as a working
paper in 2018 by Sanghamitra Bandyo-
padhyay and Elliott Green, respectively
of Queen Mary University of London and
the London School of Economics, found
a similar figure among a sample of 26
countries: 22%.
All researchers note that youngergenerationsaremorelikelytospurn
ethnic barriers. About 17% of women’s
first marriages in 1984 were interethnic,
rising to 26% in 2014, according to Ms
Bandyopadhyay and Mr Green.
Urbanisation is one reason for the
increase. In cities there are more people
from different backgrounds with whom
to consort than in villages. It is harder for
nosy relatives to interfere. Education
matters, too. More schooling means
higher incomes and more choices.
Yet there is more to the trends than
schooling and cities, says Ms Crespin-
Boucaud. Also important are changing
cultural attitudes. These days marrying
outside one’s group is less likely to be
taboo. Why this has happened faster in
some countries (such as Uganda) than
others (such as Niger) is unclear.
Whatever the reasons, boundary-
spanning marriages are good news, and
not just for the happy couples. Another
paper, published in 2018 by Boniface
Dulani of the University of Malawi and
three co-authors, suggests that children
of mixed marriages are less likely to vote
along ethnic lines. Ethnically driven
politics has been used to explain many
African woes, from conflict to corrup-
tion. So if love can blur these boundaries,
all the better.Consciouscoupling
Mixed marriagesJOHANNESBURG
More Africans are marrying partners of different ethnicities