No need to panic, we have been at war for two decades but we are still standing- Mnangagwa

President Emmerson Mnangagwa today said there was no need for Zimbabweans to panic over fuel price increases as the country has learnt to be resilient and innovative in order to survive.

He said the country had survived two decades of western sanctions and was still standing so it would sail through the recent fuel price hikes.

The price of fuel has risen twice in the past week and was about to be increased before Mnangagwa intervened.

Writing in the Sunday Mail, the President said: “We are looking at the whole duty framework to cushion our economy from shocks and pressures from galloping fuel prices.

“There is no need for panic.

“I have already directed the Ministry of Energy and Energy Development to review and reduce duty and surcharges on fuel, so the pump prices of petrol and diesel remain manageable.

“We need stability in the fuel market so we minimise imported inflation for price stability in the economy.”

Mnangagwa said Zimbabwe would sail through because it had already survived two decades of sanctions that were meant to cripple the country.

“For more than two decades, we have been in some kind of war we call illegal western economic sanctions,” he wrote.

“These sanctions have been wide-ranging, clearly designed to stymie the whole gamut of our economic activity.

“Both American ZDERA sanctions, and those by the European Union which are beginning to be eased somewhat, were designed to hurt us, indeed to attack all sinews of our economy.

“We have been under siege already, weathering multiple exogenous shocks.

“Our agriculture, our mining, our trade relations, our access to global finance, our infrastructures, our health and social services, our national security, and certainly our bilateral, international and multilateral relations — all these have been curtailed by sanctions.

“Well before the West’s ouster of Russia from international payment system SWIFT, Zimbabwe was already grappling with international payment challenges because of illegal sanctions.

“Powerful economies of the West have been determined to strangulate us.

“We have been in a war: at war for more than two decades without a truce, without a ceasefire.

“Two decades of a war without humanitarian corridors.

“A total war where a whole people are a legitimate target. This unreported war has levied billions on us, stymied our growth and limited our prospects.

“In 2000, when this aggression started, we were just two decades from a brutal Liberation Struggle which claimed more than 70 000 of our people, and which set us back several decades by way of postponed development.

“Yet we still stand.

“The situation of turbulence is thus not new to us.”

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