MDC to release full list of election candidates Thursday

By Tichaona Sibanda
13 January 2008

The full list of all MDC candidates for next month’s presidential, parliamentary, senatorial and urban council elections will be released on Thursday, a day before the nomination court. Party leader Morgan Tsvangirai has already been endorsed as the presidential candidate and is expected to launch their election manifesto on the 23rd February.

A number of primaries are taking place countrywide Wednesday, following delays over the initial choice of candidates in some of the constituencies.

A provisional list of candidates shows that the party’s two well-known spokesmen, William Bango and Pishai Muchauraya, are contesting the parliamentary poll in Chikomba and Makoni South. Veteran journalist Bango is a former spokesman for Tsvangirai. This would be his first time contesting in any election in independent Zimbabwe.

Muchauraya, the fearless Manicaland spokesman, is standing against his old Zanu PF rival Shadreck Chipanga, the man who narrowly beat him by less than 240 votes in the 2005 elections, when both men stood for the Makoni East seat.

Marondera farmer Ian Kay is standing again in Marondera central, another seat which the MDC narrowly lost in 2005. Contesting against Defence Minister Sydney Sekeramayi, a Zanu-PF heavyweight, Kay lost that contest by a mere 86 votes.

‘We didn’t lose those elections. The results were manipulated by the election officials to ensure that the cabinet ministers retained their seats through hook and crook,’ Muchauraya said.

The party’s director of elections Ian Makone is a candidate for Goromonzi West while his wife Theresa, the Women’s Assembly chairperson, is contesting the Harare North seat currently held by Trudy Stevenson from the Mutambara faction. Sekai Holland, the secretary for research and policy, is a senatorial candidate for Hwata in Mbare. She has been recovering in Australia from serious injuries sustained during last March’s crackdown on the opposition, that left some activists dead and hundreds more injured.

The MDC’s chief representative in London, Hebson Makuvise, said they are confident of snatching back other seats lost to Zanu PF in the last parliamentary elections. Like Muchauraya, Makuvise strongly believes Zanu-PF won more seats than the MDC as a result of rigging and intimidation.

‘If you look closely at the results, some were controversially declared in favour of Zanu-PF candidates, after two or three recounts that still showed MDC candidates as the winners,’ Makuvise said.