It is the sole mandate of Miss Tourism Zimbabwe (MTZ) Trust to make sure the pageant comes to fruition, Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) boss Karikoga Kaseke has said.
By Kennedy Nyavaya
There has been misunderstandings over who is in the steering wheel after ZTA apparently passed on the responsibility to MTZ patron Barbara Mzembi.
“If there is any misunderstandings, we will take our licence because we do not want that, but when we license someone, they should follow our conditions and so far Mrs Mzembi has been doing so and we are happy,” said Kaseke.
“We give licences to people we think can run the pageant, so we gave the licence in the full hope and faith that the licensed person can do it.”
Mzembi may have to gather strength in hosting this year’s pageant after last year’s anchor sponsor also pulled out.
Last year’s historic event — believed to have cost over a million dollars — could be hard to pull off again for the organisation, but they are not losing hope.
When questioned on how she would bring the show together without ZTA on board, Mzembi professed ignorance over the authority’s apparent pull-out.
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On Friday, the pageant’s spokesperson Spencer Manyemba told The Standard Style that they had not “received communication from ZTA regarding that”.
Manyemba also added that the three-day auditions set to end today were going according to plan.
“The auditions are going on well and yes, we are finding what we want in the girls,” he said.
To avoid disappointments from ambiguous sponsors, MTZ has decided to engage the nation in fundraising for its activities through the $1 Campaign, which has been running for a number of months now.
“It is because we want MTZ to have self-sustenance in the near future, thus its purpose is to promote and fund itself so that we do not solely depend on the sponsors,” he said, adding that the response has, however, so far been poor.
“The $1 Campaign has not been well-received by our nation, so we are putting more effort to ensure that Zimbabweans participate at all levels, but first we want to make sure the initiative is well-received,” Manyemba said.
This year’s anchor sponsor is said to have chosen anonymity, but Mzembi has plans to turn the local pageant into an international event.
“I think we have a lot of things we can do in Zimbabwe, that our queens can do in our country and that is very important to me,” she said.
This year’s grand finale is set for December 9, with foreign technical people expected to help local service providers pull off a show of a similar magnitude to its predecessor.
