I was really pleased to see the Parliamentary Monitoring Trust (Zimbabwe) telling it like it is … their focus in their recently published Parliamentary Monitor is on Members of Parliament who don’t attend Parliamentary sittings.

According to the PMTZ, Heneri Dzinotyiwei, MDC-T, Budiriro hasn’t shown his face at 26 sittings. Whilst Jonathan Moyo, Zanu PF, Tsholotsho North has been missing for 31 and Jameson Timba, MDC-T, Mount Pleasant has been absent for 29 sittings.

Are there legitimate reasons for this high level of non-attendance? Where do ordinary Zimbabweans access information like this which will help them make informed decisions when an election comes around? It’s important that we vote according to performance. When ordinary people don’t do their jobs properly they get fired. Let’s fire MPs that renege on their duties.

Here’s an excerpt from the PMTZ’s bulletin:

Then as chance would have it, my mom attended a wedding in Harare and she came back complaining that she had seen very big houses. “And why would people build such big houses, covering this whole yard,” she said waving across our big rural yard. She then said that she had been told that politicians lived there. “This has made me realise that we vote them so that they become rich. As such, I will not vote again. I will get into the ballot box to spoil my vote. I will mark 3 times, I know how to do it as we were taught to vote.” The reasoning in my mom’s argument was an eye opener. The intellectuals may continue to argue it is going to be difficult to get that vote out. Maybe the two intellectuals were wrong. They may have been arguing in the abstract. But for my mother, it was a resolution she could have made. We may have apathy. Or more spoiled ballots. The two may be a result of lack of voter education. But using my mom’s argument, the spoilt papers are not out of ignorance but a protest.

Subscribe to the electronic version of the Parliamentary Monitor by emailing: pmtzimbabwe [at] gmail [dot] com

This entry was posted on May 3rd, 2012 at 9:55 am by Bev Clark and is filed under Activism, Governance, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.