Zimbabwe’s media was on Tuesday awash with news about the presentation of a preliminary delimitation report by the country’s electoral body to President Emmerson Mnangagwa, a possible armyworm outbreak and a shortage of driver’s licence discs.
All media outlets led with Monday’s handing over of the delimitation report to Mnangagwa by Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) chairperson Priscilla Chigumba.
According to the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, Mnangagwa has seven working days to study the report before submitting it to parliament for input.
Parliament would have 14 days to study the report and submit comments.
The final delimitation report would be used to demarcate new boundaries for Zimbabwe’s 210 parliamentary constituencies and thousands of council wards ahead of general elections scheduled for July 2023.
The privately owned Standard weekly reported that ZEC had previously come under fire from the main opposition Citizens Coalition for Change for presiding over what the party claimed was a flawed delimitation process.
It said Harare mayor Jacob Mafume has accused ZEC of ignoring input from the country’s largest city in the delimitation process, including calls to increase the number of wards from 46 to 55 to cater for the growing population.
The opposition party also wants the number of wards in the second city Bulawayo increased from 20 to 35.
The state-run Herald daily reported on fears of an outbreak of the African armyworm, which has been reported in Malawi.
Quoting Department of Migratory Pests and Biosecurity Control director Shingirayi Nyamutukwa, the daily said the government has warned farmers to be on high alert for armyworm caterpillars in their fields.
The official said the government had enough stocks of chemicals for controlling the spread of the armyworm and these would be availed for free to affected farmers.
The privately owned NewsDay reported that Transport Minister Felix Mhona has blamed the shortage of metal driver’s license discs on Western economic sanctions that have seen the “government failing to procure raw materials”.
Mhona told the daily that the Central Vehicle Registry has been struggling to clear a huge backlog of driver’s licences.
“For a better context, the raw materials used in the manufacture of licence discs are imported, and because of sanctions, it has been hard to procure them from the traditional suppliers in the USA (United States of America),” Mhona said.
Zimbabwe has since 2002 been subject to Western economic sanctions targeting senior government officials and some parastatals accused of engaging in or facilitating human rights abuses.
JN/APA