ANESU MASAMVU
United Zimbabwe Alliance (UZA) president Elisabeth Valerio has said her entry into politics is driven by the motive to transform the lives of Zimbabweans who she says are living in “abject poverty”.
Valerio sees her party formed last year forming the next government in 2023.
“I have a very successful career, I have everything I could ever want in my life, but when you build a successful career and you look at the people who live just a few kilometers away from you and you see that their life is not in order and you know it has been like that for so many years and there are no answers coming because I don’t see any potential changes to the solutions that are coming.
“It is the same faces, the same people standing and saying we will change Zimbabwe tomorrow,” Valerio told Business Times.
She added, “For me, we are in a situation where people are dying of hunger, people are dying because they do not have hospitals that provide for them, so I cannot live my wonderful life and watch the rest of Zimbabwe suffer, my concern is for the people of Zimbabwe.”
The politician, who runs a viable safari business in Hwange, said her party has a concrete plan to address some of the challenges affecting the economy and removing the use of foreign currency would be one of the key changes to the economy.
“We have got a very turbulent history when you look at the economics of our country, a lot of people have proposed different solutions, we have got brilliant people today in government who say they have the answer to our economics.
“I hear people saying the solution is to keep the US dollar but as UZA the one thing that we know is that we need different solutions, we need to take a different approach as a government, we need to regain and restore confidence in this country before we talk of economic stability,” she said.
Valerio is a firm believer in the local currency.
“I also happen to believe that in Zimbabwe our answer is not relying on a foreign currency, you cannot build a future on someone else’s dollar, how does that work, how do we become a viable economic contender when we don’t have our own currency,” she said.
Valerio said her party is being funded by members.
“We are being funded by Zimbabweans, by our own members, it is fully Zimbabwean funded, we are capacitating ourselves through our members, we have citizens now throughout Zimbabwe.
“We are a growing political party, our goal is to reach 6.5 million members by the time we get to 2023, we are seeing tremendous growth so we don’t need to look abroad we don’t need to look anywhere else, it all about Zimbabweans for us.”
UZA which is predominantly yellow in its colour and themed around being driven by citizens through the leader Valerio rubbished the idea that they were inspired by the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change since the party was started in May last year.
“As we were watching the establishment of the new version of the MDC, we were actually surprised because as we were seeing them unfold, we have been travelling throughout Zimbabwe, our members know and the thing with us is that we have been mostly in rural areas and we haven’t been a social media political party, so we have always had yellow t-shirts, yellow is our colour, it is one of the colours on our logo, we also use brown, baize and green colors, so we have got a range of different colours but majorly we have used yellow,” said Valerio.
She added, “If you look at footage even from last year, we have had events and people have been wearing yellow, it is actually surprising to me that people in Zimbabwe don’t do their homework and look at what is really happening, copy and paste is what has happened a lot, the same thing with our approach towards citizens engagement, we have had it at the very heart of our ideology, that is literally what we have said from day one and we won’t deviate from what we are saying.”
