MDC Vice President and former Finance Minister, advocate Tendai Biti has said that the simple solution to the Zimbabwean currency crisis was bringing back the United States dollar.
Speaking during the launch of the Road to Economic Recovery, Legitimacy, Openness And Democracy (#RELOAD) at Harare Gardens on Thursday (today), Biti said:
We have to deal with the messy monetary policy. The USD was never imposed by any government in this country. The US dollar was imposed by a public… a citizen that recognised that its own currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, then known as the bearer cheque, had become an instrument of arbitrate. So It the people of Zimbabwe who declared a vote of no confidence in their own currency.
So far as I know, once a currency is caught in flagrento, it is not possible to reintroduce the same. That is why in the history of finance and economics there is no country that has involuntarily de-dollarise that has been able to re-dollarise, it’s not possible.
So as a simple solution in the short term, the MDC proposes the redollarisation of the Zimbabwean economy. We have to bring back the US dollar. As a simple solution to the crisis.
His remarks come as the government has, since 2016, been implementing currency reforms which resulted in the introduction of surrogate currency, bond notes, and the introduction of a quasi-currency, RTGS$. Through Statutory Instrument 142 of 2019, the government reintroduced the Zimbabwe dollar and banned the use of all foreign currencies for domestic transactions.
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