Jonathan Moyo tells Mushayavanhu to stick to monetary policy and leave money changers to the police

The warped logic is that if you support the ZiG, you must support anything and everything that the RBZ Governor, the RBZ itself or even the government in general say or do about the ZiG. “You supported the RBZ governor and gave him kudos when he launched the ZiG on 5 April, you must now support his World Bank gaffe because you supported him for his MPS”. It must be said that this kind of reasoning – if it is ‘reasoning’ at all –  is not only irrational but it is a kind of nonsense which is also outrageously primitive.

There are no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ or two ways about this fact: it was plainly wrong for Dr Mushayavanhu to speak in the manner he did about the role of a World Bank consultant in the processes that led to the adoption of the ZiG, and it was worse for him to say the World Bank should have contributory liability and therefore should therefore shoulder a larger chunk of the responsibility for anything that might not be going as planned regarding the launch of the ZiG currency; supposedly because the Work Bank did more work, allegedly since the RBZ did not quite know what to do.

Be that as it may, this observation does not and cannot in any way, shape or form detract or subtract anything from the robust content in the maiden Monetary Policy Statement [MPS] delivered by Dr Mushayavanhu on 5 April 2024, in which he launched ZiG. That MPS deserved the kudos given to it then by many including this writer, and deserves those kudos even today.

Furthermore, the observation that Dr Mushayavanhu’s World Bank remarks were wrong does not mean that there’s therefore any rational basis for any rational person to conclude that the unfortunate remarks necessarily vindicate any delusional nonsense that has been said or is being said by Zimbabwe’s detractors either about the 5 April MPS or about the ZiG currency that was launched in that MPS. Nothing like that, whatsoever.

Still further, and more critically, the wrong and unfortunate remarks made by Dr Mushayavanhu do not in and of themselves make him a bad guy, nor – and this is particularly important to understand – do the remarks make the ZiG a bad domestic currency. It simply means the remarks made by Dr Mushayavanhu were wrong, misplaced and ill-advised. As RBZ Governor, he should not have said what he said; his remarks were not just unfortunate, they were disastrous and potentially damaging to his position and to the institutional standing and reputation of the RBZ. This fact had to be pointed out by supporters of the ZiG currency in the strongest and clearest terms with no holds barred, for Dr Mushayavanhu to take note without being mistaken or confused about anything; end of the story.

In this connection, Dr Mushayavanhu would be well advised to appreciate that – unlike the circumstances that surrounded the tenure of his last two predecessors, namely Dr John Mangudya and Dr Gideon Gono respectively, his RBZ governorship has come at a time of dramatically changed and rapidly changing national and regional situations, and global geopolitics, with new opportunities and challenges for Zimbabwe that have implications on Dr Mushayavanhu’s public communication approach and his engagement style within RBZ and with the Central Bank’s strategic stakeholders in the banking and financial services sectors in and outside the country.

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