In a new twist to what was promising to be a Battle Royale in the 23 August harmonised general election – between the much adored DrThoko_Khupe and the odds-on favourite Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube – for the honour to represent Bulawayo’s Cowdray Park constituency in the National Assembly, Dr Khupe has been withdrawn and put on the top of CCC’s Bulawayo metropolitan province’s Senate proportional representation party-list, on which Prof Welshman Ncube is number two after her.
While the new twist is on the back of what has manifestly
become an indefinitely prolonged, opaque, dysfunctional and centrally
manipulable CCC “candidate selection” process underwritten by intrigue and
uncertainty, Dr Khupe, who has not been seen in public doing active politics
for some time, is in fact not feeling her best; and good sense appears to be
finally dawning on all and sundry that it would be just too much and even cruel
to have her slug it out in what is most definitely going to be a gruelling election
contest.
Makhupe is not well, and this is not a secret to those
close to her. That’s why right from the start, the understanding and her
expectation was that she would be on a party-list for either the women’s quota
or the Senate. But overzealous yet cowardly self-appointed CCC apparatchiks
afraid of taking on Prof Mthuli Ncube then conspired to come up with
Machiavellian claims that Dr Khupe was the only one in CCC who could “defeat”
Prof Ncube in Cowdray Park.
Meanwhile – as captured in the attached audio – a hurriedly
convened and chaotically organised CCC “candidate selection caucus” for Cowdray
Park run by a nervous team from Harare, had already “selected” Dr Khupe in her
absence as the party’s National Assembly candidate for the constituency.
Out of a paltry 342 “voting” CCC activists – some of them
who were not registered as voters – Dr Khupe was “selected” by just 222 in a
constituency that had 24, 403 registered voters as of 30 May 2022, when the
delimitation voters roll was closed.
It is no wonder that – despite having touted its murky
“community selection caucuses” some three months ago as an “innovative and
democratic” candidate selection process in which communities would have the
last word on the choice of their local authority and parliamentary
representatives under the CCC banner, the latest CCC propaganda is that in
fact, none of the community processes has the last say.
This has left little if any doubt that the final word is
with Advocate Nelson Chamisa who said last year that he would personally
approve each and every nomination form for CCC local authority and
parliamentary election candidates in the 2023 election who number some 2,440.
Interestingly, Cowdray Park is a new peri-urban
constituency in Bulawayo with three big wards: 6, 15 and 28 which are
essentially ruralised.
Since 30 May 2022, and especially after Prof Ncube’s candidature was confirmed, the constituency has registered very high numbers of new voters up 2 June 2023, when the voters registration was closed to enable ZEC to prepare the final voters roll for the harmonised general election on 23 August 2023!
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