Staff reporter
Presidential Spokesperson, George Charamba has dismissed the misleading speculations by private media, Newsday in particular, that United Nations (UN) had urged President Emmerson Mnangagwa to reject the Private Voluntary Organisation (PVOs) Amendment Bill, Harare post has learnt.
Responding to an article circulated by Newsday on his official twitter page, Charamba said the PVO bill would be signed into law despite the efforts by Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and other stakeholders to ditch it.
“This highly misleading story by Newsday stems from feigned ignorance or simply indolent journalism. Their reports must incorporate views of State parties and they should not just view their personal opinions in the name of the UN and ahead of tabling fact based findings to relevant arms such as UN. This requires basic on line checks which the routinely misleading Newsday has no time for.
“None of the quoted rapporteurs visited Zimbabwe to engage Government on the PVO bill, which the President will sign inspite of their extra mandate noises. It is behaviours like these on part of adjunctive or associational figures of UN which puts UN agencies into disrepute, including being kicked out of African countries as happened a few days ago in east and west Africa,” said Charamba.
Speaking to this publication, a political analyst, Jeremiah Chirasha said he had observed heighted interference of western funded agencies in the country’s domestic affairs at a time the country is moving into the election season.
“Some western agencies are currently on a warpath to impede the PVO bill, supposedly on the grounds that the proposed law will curtail operations of civic society organisations. The agencies are mobilising journalists to aggressively push their partisan propaganda and influence domestic agenda setting.
“This is happening at a time we are moving into the election season to try and derail the Government in the public eye. We are not willing to accept the watered down toothless version which is clearly false propaganda from the west funded agencies in the context of their malicious machinations,” said Chirasha.
Meanwhile, President Emmerson Mnangagwa is of the view that the PVO bill is in line with international best practices, and will not curtail humanitarian work by churches and genuine NGOs which will flush out dirty money being laundered through some NGOs and make Zimbabwe compliant with international protocols in line with vision 2030.
