DPP fails to pay IT expert hired to rig 2014 Elections

Malawi’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is failing to pay an Information Technology (IT) expert, Christopher Aublic Ligomeka, millions of Kwacha for hacking a Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) system used for counting votes during the 2014 Tripartite Elections.

Ligomeka made the claims when Malawi24 interviewed him but he refused to reveal the amount of money the blue party owes him.

When asked to reveal contract agreements he had with the DPP, Ligomeka said he was linked to the party by Ken Kalirani after doing some work at his hospital.

According to Ligomeka, he is only recognized in DPP by the country’s Vice President Saulos Chilima.

He said despite his efforts communicating with Chilima, there have been no positive results from the party and he does not know when his money will be paid.

He said: “I was never paid; Mr Kalirani exploited my potential by promising me a contract to connect all hospitals. So he later asked for help to connect DPP tally centre which was beyond my expectation and there was no turning back but to finish and pretend nothing happened.”

“DPP officials don’t know about me, only Chilima acknowledged my presence that I was the one who helped them. After I emailed him my concerns he promised me to wait for some time as things take time to mature.”

In a Facebook post, Ligomeka revealed that he was invited to Kalirani’s office in city centre where he was asked to use his router to access a mirror system for MEC because the system was similar to his.

“I didn’t doubt because they issued me a soft copy of MEC letter allowing them to host tally centre same with all other parties. The objectives were to provide access to statistics of figures (results) from all centres.”

“After having successful connection, I was advised to block at least 50 laptops of DPP monitors from access[ing] everything apart from web interface of results and I did per instructed.”

“To my surprise there were no figures or results coming in and I observed that somebody with officials was making changes to a file within a mirrored folder regularly. They would instruct me to connect at a certain period then disconnect while they work with the file offline until next day when I overheard them saying “Tayipomboneza MEC”. I was the one who printed the copy of that letter which blocked even MDF for investigations,” reads part of his Facebook post.

During the 2014 Tripartite Elections, MEC officials announced that the electronic vote-tallying system had broken, a situation that forced them to resort to fax and email.

The system “was failing to take the information from the ground where data clerks were stationed to send the results.”

Whereas former head of state Joyce Banda claimed the information system that MEC used for the management of the results of the poll was tampered deliberately, limiting monitors’ ability to effectively carry out their duties.

Though she faced resistant from quarters of the society, Banda called for a recount just days after the general election amid claims of vote-rigging and computer hacking.

Banda said: “It has come to my attention that there [are] some serious irregularities in the counting and announcement of results in some parts of the country. In light of these concerns – and concerns emerging from other stakeholders, which includes other political parties – I call upon MEC to carry out an immediate manual audit of the whole process.”

Malawi24 could not establish the authenticity of the claims but MEC told Malawi24 they are investigating and taking the revealing claims Ligomeka has made seriously.