Zimbabwe’s new parliamentarians to be sworn-in on Wednesday

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Zimbabwe’s new parliamentarians to be sworn-in on Wednesday

7:53 CAT | 04 Sep 2018

Members of the 9th Parliament of Zimbabwe will be sworn-in on Wednesday, marking the official beginning of the post-Robert Mugabe era.The Parliament of Zimbabwe said in a notice on Tuesday all elected members of the National Assembly and Senate would be sworn-in and inducted at 10am (0800 GMT) at Parliament Building in Harare on September 5.

This would be the first Zimbabwean parliament elected after Mugabe’s fall at the hands of the military in November 2017.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ZANU PF cruised to victory in National Assembly elections on July 30, winning 144 of the 210 contested seats in the 270-seat parliament against 64 for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Alliance.

One independent candidate made it into the National Assembly while the National Patriotic Front has one seat.

Zimbabwe’s National Assembly is made up of 270 seats, 210 of which were contested in parliamentary elections while an additional 60 seats are reserved for women.

ZANU PF got 35 of the 60 reserved seats that are allocated by proportional representation based on the percentage of votes won by each political party in the constituency elections. Each of the 10 administrative provinces gets six reserved seats.

The MDC Alliance, which is led by Nelson Chamisa, got 24 of the reserved seats while a breakaway MDC formation led by Thokozani Khupe got one seat.

The reserved seats brought the total number of National Assembly seats held by ZANU PF to 179 out of 270 seats.

The same format applies to Zimbabwe’s 80-member Senate where the proportional representation system is used to choose 60 members.

Six Senate representatives per province were elected on a proportional basis from each of the 10 provinces based on the amount of votes for each party.

To these are added two representatives of persons with disabilities.

The remainder are 18 traditional chiefs, comprising the president and deputy president elected by the National Council of Chiefs and two chiefs elected from each of the eight non-metropolitan provinces which exclude Harare and Bulawayo provinces.

Source: APA