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Nduduzo Tshuma Political Editor
ZANU-PF Bulawayo province has more party supporters outside its structures than inside, an anomaly that will be addressed when it conducts a restructuring exercise soon, a senior official said yesterday.

Party secretary for youth affairs Cde Pupurai Togarepi who is heading the restructuring exercise in the province yesterday said the process would last up to three weeks from the date that Bulawayo province agrees on.

Cde Togarepi on Saturday held a meeting with the Bulawayo provincial leadership where they agreed on the format of the exercise.

Bulawayo structures last month came under fire from party secretary for administration Cde Ignatius Chombo who accused the province of presenting to the party doctored figures of members that don’t tally with structures.

“I was in Bulawayo and met the senior leadership of the party to map a way forward on restructuring as I was appointed the point person for the province. We deliberated on the way we would conduct the exercise and they’ll hold a meeting to agree on the date,” said Cde Togarepi. “We’re going all out, each district at a time in our numbers speaking to the people in our mobilisation drive. We’ve discovered that there are many Zanu-PF supporters in Bulawayo outside party structures and we want to correct that. Everyone should be in the structures of the party from the Politburo member right to the bottom.”

Cde Togarepi said after the restructuring programme they would wait for the national political commissar Cde Savior Kasukuwere to declare a date for provincial elections.

He said the exercise would enable the party reconcile the number of supporters with the existing structures.

“We’re looking at plus or minus three weeks to conduct the process. Once we do the restructuring and verification of structures, we’ll be in a position to tell if the structures tally with our numbers,” said Cde Togarepi.

Cde Chombo last month rapped the party’s provincial structures for providing fictitious and shambolic membership records, which he said affected strategy formulation and projection of election results.

Addressing a workshop for the secretaries of administration in the main, women and youth wings at a Bulawayo hotel, Cde Chombo singled out Bulawayo as the major culprit for inflating the number of party structures, purporting to have 115 districts yet numbers in recent elections only tallied in five districts.

He said it has become the culture that some provinces inflate the number of party districts to have superiority over others with regards to allocation of leadership positions and perceived party strength.

Zanu-PF won all contested five constituencies in the Bulawayo during the June 10 by-elections ending the MDC-T’s 15-year-old stranglehold of the city.