THE opposition MDC yesterday said it will soon launch a fundraising exercise as it requires $100 million to prepare for the 2023 harmonised elections. MDC leader Douglas Mwonzora told the media that the party would hold an elective congress next month, where all posts would be up for grabs.
“We are also fundraising very hard for the party. We want to raise $100 million for the elections for us to do very well when it comes to next year,” he said.
Mwonzora said the party’s restructuring exercise was now 65 percent complete. “We as the MDC, first and foremost as a party that was shaken due to divisions that happened, we are trying to build our party, its structures. We are now at 65 percent through with the exercise, which is a very important one,” he said.
He said the elective congress would also discuss the issue of electoral reforms. “First of all, it will be an elective congress. This is a congress which is so long overdue from 2014. There is only one elected person in the MDC leadership right now and that is the president himself, having been elected at an extra-ordinary congress.
The rest of the leadership have not been elected in recent years. “Every position is up for grabs, including the Presidency itself. We are going to open it and whoever wishes to contest for any position is free to do so,” he said.
The party would field a presidential candidate, 210 Members of Parliament and 1 958 councillors in the forthcoming elections. In the 2018 elections, the party, then called the MDC-T, fielded Thokozani Khupe for president while the MDC Alliance (now Citizens Coalition for Change) had Nelson Chamisa, in an election which was won by Zanu PF candidate President Emmerson Mnangagwa Mwonzora said the results of the recent by-elections in which the MDC failed to win any seats in both council and parliament showed that the party did not have structures in place.
“The by-elections for us are gone, we cannot dwell on them, but we did learn a lot. First of all, about the structure of our party. We discovered that where we thought that we had structures, we had no structures and we have corrected that.”
“Besides that, these by-elections are very difficult to learn from because they were the most apathetic by-elections in recorded history. “There is a gentleman in Tsholotsho who had 27 votes and he is a councillor right now, so that level of apathy is such that with 22 percent one cannot really boast of winning a by-election because it was one of the numerically useless by-elections we ever had,” said Mwonzora.
He said they were working on strengthening the party structures and would set up strong organising and information and publicity departments. “So, with the way things are moving, we can see that we will be successful next year,” said Mwonzora. — New Ziana
