Barely a week after presidential spokesman George Charamba revealed that a-non-Nelson-Chamisa party has registered an entity called CCC, the electoral commission has ducked down the report saying none of that has happened.
Last Monday Charamba gloated saying Chamisa is has hit a brickwall because a party bearing his social moto, Citizens Convergence for Change has been registered.
All this happened when a Bulawayo resident known to support Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Zanu PF, Varaidzo Musungo, wrote to Zec claiming ownership of the name CCC, which has been widely used by opposition Nelson Chamisa’s MDC Alliance.
The registrant was in the same day revealed as a ZANU PF supporter, and the Charamba mockery backfired.
Responding to the development, Zec spokesperson Joyce Kazembe has since said it was impossible to acknowledge receipt of CCC as a political party because it did not provide enough details upon notifying the commission of its existence.
“Zec does not register political parties, but it simply receives notifications upon formations of new parties,” she said.
“The commission received a notification from the CCC political group, but since it was incomplete, we did not acknowledge its existence. There are no contact details such as emails or phone numbers, hence it was impossible to acknowledge receipt upon the notification of their existence.”
There has been debate around the need to register political parties in Zimbabwe, with some people advocating for conditions on party registration.
Former Zec commissioner Qhubani Moyo said the biggest challenge over years was that there were no regulations that defined the registration of political parties in Zimbabwe.
“There is no law to register political parties in Zimbabwe,” he said.
“Political parties are not registered. All you do is to just write to Zec and say, we are a grouping of names A or B, which is why some people have been advocating for registration of political parties so that a political party can be defined in terms of what constitutes the political party, organic composition and so many things.”
Moyo said the country should copy what other countries do when a new party registers to contest elections to avoid confusion.
“I am told that there is also another party that has written to Zec under the name Zimbabwe Alliance for Movement Unit, and I think this is the Chamisa brigade trying also to create confusion on the name of Zanu PF,” he said.
“In other countries, for you to qualify to be a political party that is successfully registered, you are supposed to have a certain number of registered members from each province. But as for Zimbabwe, there is no definition on what constitutes a political party since there is no registration for political parties.
“You can just decide today that you are now a political party and still contest for election. This is why we have so much confusion in Zimbabwe.” – Newsday/additional reporting