Youths from Methodist Village, located in peri-urban Bulawayo, have blamed
their lack of interest in voting processes on the lack of accountability and
consultation by their elected leaders.
Speaking at a focus group
meeting organised by the National Youth Development Trust (NYDT), the young
people said that the last time they interfaced with both their councillor and Member
of Parliament (MP) was during the campaign stages of the 2008 elections. Despite being the poorer parts of the
constituency, they claimed that the MP even failed to allocate a portion of the
Constituency Development Fund to them but concentrated the fund in the urban
side of his constituency.
“Even our MP seems to have
forgotten about us because we only heard that there was CDF but all of it was
used to benefit Urban Pumula,” complained Thembinkosi Mafu.
They blamed the delimitation process for joining together their area
(peri-urban) with an urban area to form one ward as a major contributor to
their marginalisation in developmental processes. They instead called for the
separation of Peri-urban Pumula from the urban side of Pumula. “It is
obviously difficult for one person to serve both a peri urban and an urban area
so to me the solution would be to separate the two so that at least we are
adequately represented,” suggested Calvin Dube.
The challenge of inadequate representation was also cited as the
reason why most young people have chose to stay away from voting. However at
the end of the meeting it was agreed that more young people from the area
should register to vote as this will oil their campaign for the designation of
their area as a separate constituency.
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