4H Zimbabwe Fights for Peace Ahead of 2023 National Elections
By Delicious Mathuthu
A Harare based Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), 4H Zimbabwe, is making strides in bringing together youths from different political parties in the country through sport and dialogue to minimise incidences of violence in the upcoming elections.
The organisation, which seeks to empower and capacitate youths into being responsible and caring leaders who contribute positive change in the world around them, says young people are usually in the forefront when it comes to cases of political violence.
4H Zimbabwe Executive Director, John Muchenje, says their intervention in the Zimbabwean political landscape is to try and mould tolerant young adults accross the political divide.
He says they initially started working with the three main political parties in Parliament but realised the need to involve other fringe parties for a wholistic result.
“As an organisation we have seen that most young people are being used as tools for political violence.
“Thats why our intervention is targeting particularly youth in Zimbabwe across all political parties.
“We started our project with three main political parties which have Parliamentary representation in Zimbabwe, which is ZANU PF (Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front), CCC (Citizen Coalition for Change) and MDC-T (Movement for Democratic Change).
“We have roped in LEAD, FEEZ (Front for Economic Emancipation in Zimbabwe), NCA (National Constitutional Assembly) and EFF-Zim (Economic Freedom Fighters -Zimbabwe).
“We train them to be peace ambassadors and also push issues to do with tolerance where we do inter political party dialogues and discussions towards promoting peace and tolerance.
“We have also employed the use of sport as a tool to promote peace and tolerance
“Sport speaks a language which is understood by young people and it unifies people, it brings them together.
“So the more we bring young people together, the more they play together the more they become tolerant and the more that they remove issues to do with hate speech and start noting each other ahead of the 2023 elections,” Muchenje says.
The organisation is also working with the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC) on Youth for Peace programmes, as well as the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP).
Muchenje says the inter party dialogues started at national level, then down to provinces and ultimately to district level across the country.
The organisation visited Gweru as part of the dialogue programme late in 2022 where youth leaders from different political parties and their party youths came together to deliberate on issues to do with peace building.
On the downside, Muchenje says gaining trust of political parties is not easy.
He says the organisation has however tried to objectively speak to all sides and have managed to meet all Presidents of the parties concerned.
“We have surpassed what the Political Actors Dialogue (POLAD) has failed to do in terms of bringing together political parties,” Muchenje says.
For youth empowerment and recognition, the 4H Director encouraged political parties to have a quota system within their parties to allocate at least 20% of positions to potential young leaders in order for them to be adequately represented as the majority population in Zimbabwe.
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