MAM Elections: The Wrong Order, a Five-million fee, And a Question Nobody Has Answered

Imagine being told that to put your name forward to serve your own community, you must first hand over five million kwacha.

For most Malawian Muslims, that is not a nomination fee. It is a locked door. And it is one of the reasons the Muslim Association of Malawi finds itself, once again, unable to hold an election.

It is tempting to file this whole saga under "leaders fighting," and move on. Plenty have. But that would be a mistake, because underneath the personalities sit three specific, answerable questions, and each one decides something real about who gets to lead this community and how.

First, though, a word on how we got here, because it explains everything that follows.

For years the association ran on a constitution it had rewritten in 2018. Those changes reshaped who held power: they stretched terms of office, moved the choosing of the National Chairman away from the general membership, and quietly dropped the mosque-level committees as an organ of the association. A group of sixty-eight members took the matter to the High Court, arguing the changes were never lawfully made. Earlier this year, the court agreed. It struck down the 2018 constitution, restored the older 1994 one as the only valid rulebook, and ordered fresh elections under it.

Those fresh elections are the ones now in trouble. And the reason takes us straight to the three questions.

We went back to the two documents that actually matter, the restored 1994 constitution and the February High Court judgment, and read them closely. Here is what is settled, what is genuinely disputed, and what nobody has answered at all.

One: should it cost five million kwacha to stand?

Start with the fee, because it is the one every ordinary member feels.

The question is simple. Does the constitution allow it?

It does not. In fact, the constitution does not mention a nomination fee at all.

Article 32, which governs how candidates are nominated, asks for only two things. A candidate must be a registered member and voter. And two other members must nominate him. That is the entire requirement. No fee. No deposit. No sum of money anywhere.

The rules on who qualifies say the same. A candidate must be a male Muslim, a registered member and voter, literate, and at least twenty-one to sit on the Central Body. Nowhere is wealth a condition. Nowhere does the constitution ask a would-be leader to pay for the privilege.

So where does five million come from?

According to Sheikh Ali Kennedy, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, the figure was agreed at an Annual General Meeting. On that account, the membership itself, gathered in its own meeting, resolved to set the fee. It therefore carries the association's authority, not one man's.

That argument deserves a fair hearing. Elections cost money to run, and a body has to decide how to raise it. This is not a frivolous defence.

But it collides with the constitution's own wording, and the collision is hard to talk your way out of.

The list of who may stand is a closed one. Article 29 opens with the words: "No person shall be eligible for election to any office in the Association unless." What follows is a fixed set of conditions. The moment you add a fee to that list, you have created a brand-new qualification for office, one the members never wrote into their constitution.

And the constitution is very clear about how its terms get changed. There is a formal amendment procedure, in Article 38. It is not optional. In fact, it is the very procedure the High Court found had been ignored when it threw out the association's 2018 constitution earlier this year. The whole reason the community is back under the 1994 rules is that someone once changed the rules the wrong way.

So here is the tension, in one line. If five million kwacha is truly a condition of standing for office, it belongs in the constitution, put there properly, by the members, through amendment. Not announced at a meeting. A full trial will now decide whether such a fee can be charged at all, and by whom. 

Hold on to that question as you read the next two, because the same theme keeps returning: who gets to decide the rules, and did they follow the rules to do it?

Two: which elections come first?

The second dispute sounds technical. It is not. It goes to the heart of whether ordinary worshippers have any real say at all.

The question is this. Should the association have started its elections at the top, choosing the Central Body first? Or at the bottom, at the mosques?

On this, the constitution is not the least bit vague. It points firmly downward.

Picture the association as a ladder. Article 5 lists its organs from the Board of Trustees at the very top, down through Regional and District Committees, to the Jumu'a Mosque Committees at the base. And the ladder is climbed from the bottom rung up.

Each mosque sends representatives who elect the District Committee. The Districts send delegates who elect the Regional Committees. And here is the hinge: the Central Body, by its own composition rules, must include the Chairmen of all the Regional Committees.

Sit with that for a moment, because it settles the argument. This is not a matter of tradition or good manners. It is arithmetic. The Central Body literally cannot be completed until the Regional Committees exist to hand up their Chairmen. The Regions cannot exist without the Districts. The Districts cannot exist without the mosques choosing their representatives first.

Which means the grassroots must come first. Not as a kindness to the ordinary worshipper, but because the entire structure above him collapses without him. The man in the back row of the Friday prayer is not an afterthought in this constitution. He is the foundation the whole thing stands on.

So when the process began at the Central Body, at the top, it drew immediate objection. And on the constitution's own logic, the objection has force. You cannot build the roof before you have built the walls.

Three: and who is even entitled to vote?

Now the hardest question of the three. The one nobody has settled, and the one that could unravel everything.

Who, exactly, makes up the electorate?

It grows straight out of the February judgment, which ordered that the association's organs "shall be as constituted before 21st November 2021."

The Board's reading is straightforward. If the pre-2021 structures are restored, then the people who filled them are the ones who now vote and stand in the fresh elections. Simple.

Except the order does not quite say that. Read it slowly, and two problems surface.

The first: it names nobody. Not a single person. Not those elected in any particular year, not any cohort, not any list. It speaks only of the organs "as constituted" before that date. So anyone claiming the judgment restored a specific group of office-bearers is putting words into the order that the judge did not write.

The second is sharper still. The judge seems to have seen this very fight coming. He restored the organs, in his own words, "in circumstances where the terms of office of the respective organs have expired." He knew the terms had run out. And he restored the structures for one narrow, stated purpose: "to oversee and facilitate the conduct of elections." Read plainly, that is a caretaker's job. Run the elections, then hand over. It is not a return to full power, and it is certainly not a ruling on who gets to vote.

There is also a trap in the numbers that is very easy to fall into, and worth getting right. Under the constitution, the Central Body serves five years. The grassroots committees serve three. So a Central Body elected in 2016 would have run its course around 2021, not 2019. The three-year clock, the one that has already expired, belongs to the grassroots, the District, Regional and mosque committees. If any mandate has lapsed, it has lapsed hardest at the bottom of the ladder. Which is, once again, exactly where the rebuilding has to begin.

And now the part both camps tend to walk past. The February judgment did not actually settle any of this. The court took the case, narrowed it to a single question, whether the 2018 amendments were lawfully made, answered no, and then expressly declined to rule on anything else. It never found that the old office-bearers still hold a mandate. It never found that their terms had run out. It left the door standing open.

Which is precisely why everyone is now crowding through it.

The thread that ties it together

Step back, and one idea connects all three fights.

The February judgment handed the community back its rulebook. What it did not do, what it did not even try to do, was tell anyone how to use it. Who may stand. In what order the tiers are chosen. Who forms the electorate. All of that was left for another day. That day has arrived.

For the ordinary member, watching all this from the back of the mosque, that is the thing worth holding on to. This round was never really about which sheikh dislikes which sheikh. It is about what the restored rules actually mean when you try to use them. And the answers will decide far more than the next election.

They will decide whether this association is rebuilt the way its own constitution demands: from the mosque upward. From the bottom of the ladder, where the ordinary believer stands, and where, if the constitution is read honestly, all the authority was always meant to begin.

We will keep following the case, and bring you what comes next.