Former Finance Minister Tendai Biti, one of those who fought against the return of the Zimbabwe dollar while in office, says the country must ditch the United States dollar and adopt the South African rand instead. He said there was no way the country’s economy could recover with the United States dollar as the main currency.
“We can actually use firewood as a medium of exchange, it can work. Money is just an infrastructure of facilitating the base which is production. The challenge is that this economy is collapsing because it is not okay. We are not producing; the capital account is not okay, the current account is in deficit these are the things that you need to fix.
These are the structural things that you need to fix. But the debate on currency is relevant because the US dollar has become overvalued. We don’t have an economy to sustain that. We don’t have the current account to sustain that, which is the export and the imports.
What we need to do is to devalue the US dollar but you can’t do that because you don’t print it. Now there are calls for the return of the Zimdollar and this will be a disaster. We propose that the US dollar should be devalued by bringing in the rand as the official currency and joining the Rand Monetary Union.
However the tragedy is that these guys in ZANU-PF cannot afford to meet the requirements of the central bank of South Africa, they just can’t do that,” he said.
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