Elisabeth Valerio, the President of United Zimbabwe Alliance (UZA) recently won an appeal and the Court granted her permission to contest the 2023 presidential election.
Sibanda intially could not make it on the nomination day as she was disqualified as Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) refused to accept her nomination papers claiming that she had submitted them late at the Nomination Court.
The resilient, Sibanda did not give up as she appealed against her disqualification.
Sibanda becomes the only female presidential aspirant in a race of 11 men, following the court challenge.
Besides being the only woman presidential candidate, the political party she leads has also the highest number of female contestants in the National Assembly.
A detailed report by Election Resource Centre (ERC) reveals that UZA fielded 29 percent women in the National Assembly for the 27 constituencies it will be contesting.
This is a remarkable percentage in comparison with ZANU PF and CCC who managed to file contestants for all the 210 constituencies but only fielded 11 and 9 percent women respectively.
MDC T, formerly the biggest opposition political party only managed to field 1 female candidate for the 23 constituencies it will be contesting for the National Assembly.
Election Resource Centre also established that, ZAPU fielded 18 males in 18 constituencies and they do not have any female representation.
19 political parties filed nominations for the National Assembly Election.
ERC reveals that 636 candidates will be contesting for the 210 constituencies.
568 of them which is 89,3 percent are representing political parties while 68 which translate to 10,7 percent were nominated as independence candidates.
The number of women contestants dropped by 11 percent from 14.4 percent in 2018.
As noted by ERC, generally the number of contestants in the National Assembly dropped as this year has 845 less male contestants from the 1 411 men who contested in 2018.
However, even though the number of male contestants dropped, they have increased by 3,4 percent this year when compared to women contestants.
