Ward R5, Manicaland— As harmonised elections draw nearer, Zimbabweans are urged to participate in the political process peacefully as they decide who they want to be their leader for the next five years. However, citizens do not have the same political views, thus we have different political parties. Although this might lead to tension, we still aim to avoid any violence amongst ourselves.
In my constituency, the atmosphere was absolutely calm, despite having two political parties running for office. The fact that an opposition candidate has been our councillor for the past 5 years did not trigger any form of violence. Unfortunately, there were no women who were able to run for office in my ward, this was maybe because they had no resources, for example, money for the nomination fees and also money for their campaigns. However, we saw women participating as polling agents, where they represented their party candidates on election day. Because young women occupy a big percentage of the Zimbabwean constituency, the greatest number of votes come from them. This has led to political candidates treating women in a respectful way so that they vote for them and bringing projects and food for these young women during campaign rally days. However, some of the projects are not going well, leading to the revelation that only vote buying is being done by these political candidates. For example, there was a group of women who were given Sasu chicks to breed, but most of the young women said the chicks died due to unknown diseases. So some of the citizens are claiming their money saying that they had been bribed with the chicks so as to vote for these candidates, and this has caused some tensions between the political candidates and the electorate.
23 August-Election day
As citizens decide, the atmosphere is calm. We are seeing young women excited to go and exercise their constitutional rights. We are also seeing young first-time women voters happy to decide on who they want to be their leader. No violent case has been recorded.
#ZimWomenDecide