BY BLESSED MHLANGA/ MIRIAM MANGWAYA ZENGEZA West MP Job Sikhala (MDC Alliance) has written to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Jacob Mudenda asking him to rein in ruling Zanu PF party supporters he alleged were stalling a Constituency Development Fund (CDF) project he initiated in the constituency. In a letter dated March 23 2021, addressed to Mudenda, Sikhala said Zanu PF and Chitungwiza Council officials were involved in an attempt to stop the construction of a people’s market in Zengeza. He named one of the council’s directors as Tendai Chinganga. “The Chinganga guy told contractors and his workers that he will never accept any development brought by an MDC member. I then called him and told him that the project belongs to Parliament and as the MP, I was merely a facilitator,” Sikhala said in the letter. Efforts to get a comment from Mudenda were fruitless as he said he was in a meeting. But Chitungwiza Town Council has since issued a prohibition and enforcement order, stopping Sikhala from developing the market, despite that the project has approved plans and land was allocated for its construction. In the letter, Sikhala said he approached the High Court, where he challenged the prohibition and enforcement order and won the matter. However, council appealed to the Supreme Court. Sikhala called on Mudenda, who is also a Zanu PF politburo member, to exercise the powers of Parliament and stop the interference in the project. “CDF committee as a constructive organ was not cited in the prohibition order, neither were Parliament as the responsible authority and administrators of the CDF Constitution of 2017 and the Ministry of Finance as financiers of the project. This was a personal attack on my person to prohibit the project, which at all material facts is not mine, but Parliament’s,” wrote Sikhala. He said taxpayers’ funds disbursed to parliamentarians would be thrown to waste, adding that Chitungwiza Municipality should be stopped from stalling progress on a project of national interest. Zanu PF spokesperson Simon Khaya Moyo described Sikhala’s claims as cheap politicking.
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