The Sunday Mail
The launch of the Zanu-PF manifesto last Friday has given impetus to the ruling party’s youth to go, in full force, and mobilise the electorate to vote for the party. Our reporter Norman Muchemwa spoke to Zanu PF Youth Affairs chairperson Cde Pupurai Togarepi on the youths’ campaign vision. We publish excepts of the interview in Cde Togarepi’s own words.
Since the Zanu-PF manifesto has been launched, our strategy is to hit the ground running.
The leadership has set us a good pace by launching a well-articulated manifesto with a clear vision which will lead us to victory.
We now have a manifesto which talks about the issues that Zanu-PF has done historically. What we are doing now is to articulate our vision, the vision of our President going into the future.
There is no need to forcefully push a message into someone’s mind because we have the literature, we have the message from our President that is well-articulated.
We must understand that message and that is what we have to tell the people; and the people will come to vote Zanu-PF.
We now have all the resources, we want to go out to campaign and mobilise for the candidates.
So, from now onwards, it will be all systems go; campaigning mainly for the President and we will also move around with candidates whether council or MPs, we will be moving around to consolidate the already existing strength of the Party.
As we campaign, we are going to do targeted rallies in areas of interest for the youth, but we will be running these rallies together with the Commissariat and the Women’s League.
We will also mobilise to have the President attend some of our targeted gatherings so that we will raise our own profile as the youth.
We want to create more members for the party; to come join us and have more members of the youth coming to support the party during this election.
As we go towards the harmonised election, we have been given a winning manifesto and as the youth we are winners through and through.
We are saying there is no need to physically fight anybody, we have already done our ground work, we have already mobilised our membership and we are going out to mobilise more members, even from other political parties.
People are moving to Zanu-PF and there is no need to be violent.
We are saying to our members, if provoked by those in the opposition, please make a report to the police, don’t be involved in anything that will discredit our party, the name of our President or anything that will discredit our elections.
Those who are losers always want to provoke situations that will create a bad image for our elections, so we must exercise maximum restraint and this is expected from all our youth.
We will move around campaigning peacefully, talk to everybody peacefully.
I urge our Youth to campaign peacefully for our great party. We are going to win resoundingly as a party.
During the just ended primary elections, many youths participated, some won, some lost, which is very normal.
I am very happy with the youth participation and the enthusiasm they displayed in taking part in the primaries.
Through losing, vanoti in Shona yasiya mazai, you have learnt the game, when you come back in the next election, you may then win, no hard feelings from the youth.
All those who have lost, I have spoken to them and they have accepted the outcome of the democratic process of the party.
They are prepared to move on and support those who have won.
So we have many who have won in the executive of the Youth League who are at local authority level, provincial council, women’s quota and Parliament.
We are very excited because they won this after competing with the best and emerged victorious. So that to me is a process of building future leaders.
