Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) officers in Nkhotakota say they are impressed with how the nomination paper submission exercise has started in the district despite low turnup of candidates in presenting their nomination papers.
A random visit to some of the centers on Monday showed that most candidates were yet to deposit their nomination fees to various banks on Monday hence the actual presentation was expected to start on Tuesday.
In an interview after the visit, Constituency Returning Officer-CRO for Nkhotakota North-East constituency at Walemela TDC, Hastings Mwale hailed MEC for conducting a Pre-Examination exercise of candidate’s papers on Saturday and Sunday saying it has helped ease time taken in crosschecking and making corrections on the candidate’s papers.
“Most of these candidates had problems in filling the forms hence the exercise helped us correct those issues in advance thereby minimizing the correction of information at the last hour,” he said.
Sharing the sentiments made by Mwale, Nkhotakota South Constituency CRO Chrissie Chibwana said most candidates were not following the instructions written on the nomination papers thus their papers had a lot of anomalies which could have delayed the exercise.
The Nomination exercise which started on Monday 4th February 2019 and is expected to end on Friday 8th February 2019 is taking place in all the 193 constituencies of the country thereby allowing all Member of Parliament and Local Government aspirants present their papers which will make them legal contestants in the coming 21 May 2019 polls.
The exercise is running concurrently with the presidential candidate’s nomination paper submission to MEC Chair Jane Ansah at COMESA hall in Blantyre.
