Letwin Mubonesi
It was all smiles for the 21-year old rising model Hillary Mandibaya after she was crowned the new Miss Tourism Zimbabwe Harare Metropolitan queen on Saturday night during the prestigious pageant’s provincial finals held at Spin Village, Rainbow Towers, in Harare.
Mandibaya is currently studying Biological Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) while she shines in the pageantry industry. The latest title “Miss Tourism Harare Metropolitan queen” is an addition to other two crowns she has scooped before, the first princess Black Opal Face of Zimbabwe and Miss Face of Mount Pleasant all won in 2017.
The competitions are still going on as she will be joined by other provincial winners at the pageant’s grand finale to choose the country’s top tourism ambassador in November this year.
In an interview with the local paper, Mandibaya attributed the success to her personality saying that being herself, both in the boot camp and on the ramp had contributed much to her triumph.
She said, “this is not my first time doing pageants. For this one I did not know I was going to win because I auditioned so that I can learn more and winning for me was a bonus. I had fun as I made new friends from different backgrounds.”
“From my high school days, I have always been interest in pageants, but Miss Tourism Harare Metropolitan is my first professional and big pageant in my career. I am overwhelmed as this was a challenge I conquered as I believe in myself.”
“I have always told myself that I should challenge my limits and not let the limits to challenge me as I face the challenge,” she said.
Meanwhile, there were no prizes for the models who had outperformed but one of the sponsors Mhofela of Spinalong stretched his hand and forked out a few United States Dollars to give to some of the models. Another UZ student Nicole Madimutsa (19) was crowned the First Princess.
Nevertheless, there was an outcry from the patrons who felt detained as the event started late than the communicated time. The event organizers failed to stick to the initial programme and on top of that they started the event two hours late resulting in the pageant running till the wee hours of Sunday. This disturbed the whole event as some of the guests present left early while the event was still going and they failed to witness the crowning of the winners.
Despite the detention of some patrons and the inconvenience of other guests, the pageant organiser and licence holder of the four provinces, Mercy “Catwalk” Mushaninga emphasised that his year they had followed followed global trends.
“We are trying to go in tandem with the global trends that is why we have changed a lot of things even the judging criteria it was different from what we used to do. With other international pageants the outgoing queen becomes the emcee and this is the same we did with our outgoing queen Panashe.”
“Our outgoing queen was part of the boot camp and she understood our models better from the boot camp so we decided she introduces the girls as she knew them better and there was no problem her doing that. In other pageants, some even bring the outgoing queens to be part of the organizing team. We introduce new things in pageantry to make it exciting,” she said.
Mpofu-Sibanda of Fingers Academy, who is also the pageant’s national license holder, applauded Mushaninga and her team that they did their best at the event.
She said,”The organizers managed to up their game from last year’s edition. It’s good to see sponsors coming to support, we really need people across the country, to come and support us. We are done with all the 10 provinces and now it’s the big one and we are earmarking it for the month of November. We do have a tentative venue and a tentative province which we are yet to confirm.”
Genoius ‘Ginimbi’ Kadungure also graced the occasion while afro-jazz songstress Diana ‘Mangwenya’ Samkange alongside rhumba sensation Baka Ngwasuma and The Spinalong family among other performers provided entertainment.
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