Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. President Emmerson Mnangagwa said that Zimbabwe will revert to the use of the local currency as the sole legal tender and dump the multi-currency regime to accelerate economic growth.
According to Statutory Instrument (SI) 118A of 2022, the local currency and a basket of foreign currencies shall be in use until December 2025.
The SI which introduced the multi-currency regime is titled Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) (Amendment of Exchange Control Act) Regulations 2022.
Addressing delegates to the 9th CEO Africa Roundtable Conference in Victoria Falls on Thursday, 12 October, Mnangagwa said the country should revert to the exclusive use of the local currency even if it may cause suffering for some time. The Chronicle quoted him as saying:
In 2009, our domestic currency collapsed and our former President Mugabe appointed a committee of five people which I chaired to look into the currency issue.
We agreed that for us to survive we had to create a basket of currencies and allow our currency to die.
It could have been a wrong decision but that is what happened in 2009. We allowed the basket of currencies and that saved the economy, and we went in that situation for a long time.
So, we decided to introduce our own currency but still our currency continues to be fought.
However, we have to go through this cycle where as a country we must have a currency that we call our own.
We must bite the bullet, whether it gives us some suffering for a period, we shall proceed to have our own currency, not a situation where the economy has a regime of currencies in use, we want a single currency and we are going there.
Mnangagwa made the remarks while responding to participants at the 9th CEO Africa Roundtable Conference who inquired about the way forward in view of the projected expiry of the multi-currency regime in 2025.
Reports indicate that the US dollar now accounts for over 76 percent of domestic transactions.
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