HARARE – The Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) has automatically lost seven potential council seats in Rushinga district, Mashonaland Central, after party politicians who pitched up for poll nomination got disqualified for filing in wrong constituencies.
Rushinga has 25 wards and 32,820 registered voters.
Top party official David Coltart blamed the error on what he said was opaque delimitation of boundaries by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC).
The 2023 elections are being administered using new constituency boundaries drawn by ZEC.
Coltart, who will run for council in Bulawayo, took to Twitter to express dismay over the failure by his party to field candidates in the seven wards.
The former education minister said CCC candidates discovered on nomination day that their names had been moved to other wards.
“In Rushinga, CCC lost seven wards mainly because the delimitation programme affected candidates who could not know he or she could not represent the ward, only to be told by the ZEC officials on the nomination day. This was compounded by ZEC’s refusal to provide the voters roll,” he said.
Council candidates can only run for election in a ward if they are registered in that ward. In May, ZEC invited Zimbabweans to inspect the voters roll to correct errors and ensure their polling stations are correct. It is unclear how the councillors, or the CCC, did not pick the anomalies then.
ZEC said recently that electronic copies of the crucial voters roll will be availed to candidates who would have successfully filed their nomination papers.
Zanu PF claims that it has already won 74 local authority seats in which opposition parties failed to field candidates.
A total of 1,970 council seats are up for grabs in the August 23 elections.
The electoral body is expected to release names of candidates who passed the nomination stage by June 30.
