Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. ZANU PF leaders in Masvingo Province have blamed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for the ruling party’s loss to CCC in urban wards in Masvingo in the 26 March by-elections.
ZANU PF Masvingo provincial chairperson Robson Mavhenyengwa accused NGOs of giving money to people to persuade them to vote for CCC.
Mavhenyengwa singled out Community Tolerance Reconciliation and Development (COTRAD) as the culprit and warned that the ruling party has devised a counter-strategy ahead of the 2023 elections. He said:
We have done several meetings and it emerged that there were some organizations including COTRAD who were giving people money in urban wards.
We, therefore, came up with strategies that we will implement as we go into the 2023 harmonized elections but we can’t publicly speak about them right now.
Another thing that we noted is that there was generally low voter turnout on elections day so we will work very hard to win urban wards come 2023. I am confident that we will win more urban seats.
However, COTRAD Programs Manager, Zivanai Muzorodzi rejected the allegations, saying they are without foundation. He said:
Those are baseless allegations because we were simply observing the pre-election, voting process and post-election period.
People should learn to differentiate civic society and political parties because we are not aligned to any party.
ZANU PF arguably has a disdain for NGOs since the early 2000s as it accused them of funding the opposition MDC to effect regime change.
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