Harare — UNCERTAINTY shrouds the efficacy of the constitution-making process making headway this year, as the Parliamentary Select Committee continues to postpone the outreach programme.

The committee's co-chairperson, Mr Douglas Mwonzora, last night said the committee had once again deferred training of the outreach team to a later date, saying administrative issues were derailing the process.

Mr Mwonzora said consultations "were originally supposed to have started today (yesterday), but we could not send the outreach team away without training them".

The process has been seemingly at a standstill for four months as funding, among other factors, hampered progress.

"Initially, we had set outreach teams training for December 2, but that has since been postponed to a later date but definitely before December 10 because we have been concentrating on administrative issues at the moment," Mr Mwonzora said.

He said they had employed Mr Peter Kunyeko as project co-ordinator and Ms Annie Nyakunu as communications and media officer.

"The Select Committee will be meeting tomorrow (today) to discuss the issues around outreach teams training, then we will see when training can resume," he said.

"We will then announce thematic committees this week as we have been verifying names of outreach teams but we realised that some organisations were ignoring gender requirements but we have managed to address that."

Mr Mwonzora said their efforts to get the management committee involved in the process had been in vain as the committee comprises negotiators to the Global Political Agreement, who are currently engaged in the ongoing inter-party talks.

The committee comprises ministers Patrick Chinamasa (Zanu-PF), MDC-T's Tendai Biti and Welshman Ncube (MDC).

However, Mr Mwonzora expressed hope that the timeframe set in the GPA would be met even though "there will be inevitable postponements".

"We are sure the overall time limit is going to be met between July or August next year. I believe it's better to go forward slowly but surely," he added.

Turning to funding, he said the Finance Ministry had made funds available for the process and "even promised that if the funds are exhausted we can always go back for more".

The only thing that the Select Committee has managed to organise since its inception in April this year was the first stakeholders' conference held in July.

The Select Committee had set a timetable that the thematic committees were expected to start their outreach programme in August, shortly after the stakeholders' conference, but lack of money hampered progress.