Full contribution
*HON. ENG. MUDZURI: I want to appreciate Hon. Chinamasa for having made an effort to give a Ministerial Statement at a time when Zimbabweans have a crisis on the issue of cash flow. Hon. Chinamasa believes that he can bring sanity into the banking sector through the promotion of Bank Use Promotion Act. I believe that a lot of people in this country do not have a lot of money to the extent of keeping it at home. There are a lot of point of sale machines and you find people requesting for cash because they cannot access cash. If you want to arrest them, I do not know who is going to fill up these prisons. There is no money in circulation. We used to have the dollar and people would move around with loads of cash.
When you go to buy fruits such as oranges, you need hard cash. At the moment, there is no US$20 in the market. You just find US$10 notes and below. I urge you to look into this issue more seriously. If you go to OK Mart or TM supermarket where I normally visit, you find a person requesting shoppers that have hard cash to give it to him so that they can swipe for the goods that they are paying. If our intelligence organisations are doing their work, they should be able to give you this information on what the people are observing. I would want you to also observe that. A lot of people receive their salaries through the bank, the people want to use the same method of swiping everyday but we have not yet reached that stage. People are having problems accessing their salaries.
The elderly people need the hard dollar to pay for their transactions. I once spoke about this issue and I even spoke to the Vice President and he said the money will be made available. You cannot say that a donkey and cow are the same. You cannot equate a bond note to a US$. I did say that there should be a dollar account and a bond note account. There should be several bond notes so that people can use them. People do not want to buy a donkey when they can slaughter a cow and eat the meat.
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