Our US dollars should not disappear from our accounts- MP says

We started with the Minister of Finance and Economic Development who indicated that these bond notes initially were said to be for incentives on export earnings but it is the currency that is now being used to take place of the foreign currency that is in our accounts …

*THE HON. DEPUTY SPEAKER:  Order Hon. Members, I can see you cannot whisper, please lower your voices.  We also want to hear what the Hon. Member is debating and the people at the back also want to hear.

*HON. ENG. MUDZURI:  What we are saying is that you should hear what the ordinary men and women in the streets are saying.  It should be made clear that the people refused to accept the bond note and that if it is going to be used in this country, there should be separation of accounts, one in US dollar and the other one in bond notes.  When one wants to go out of the country, they will withdraw from their US dollar accounts.  The same would apply for the bond notes.  There are shops in town where prices are different for one who is using cash, swiping and using bond note.  If you have a US$100 note and a US$50, it has a different value.  We should not take this country backwards.  A lot of people suffer and the majority of these people are accessing their salaries in the form of $200 to $300 notes.  There are bank charges on a daily basis for minimum withdrawals ranging from $30 to $50 per day.

If the Reserve Bank comes up with limits, they tend to work to the disadvantage of the ordinary man because he incurs expenses arising from bank charges.  That erodes the people’s savings.  We should have a law that allows people to use a currency of their choice.  I do not know whether one can come up with nine accounts for nine currencies that we currently use.  I would want the Hon. Minister in his response, to address the issue whether you could have a Yuan account, US$ account, Rand account, Pula account, Euro account and all those currencies that are in use in Zimbabwe.  We are having problems in opening accounts for these currencies.

The problem at the moment is that we are promoting money changers that are on the streets.  They are busy exchanging currencies.  There are a lot of people who are creating other accounts outside this country.  If you want to deposit  money into a certain account, they say bring the US$ and they post that money to Dubai and other such places and they will charge you 10% or so.  So, we are creating another problem because of the introduction of the bond note and we do not know how best it can be controlled.  We should not have brought the bond notes.  The US dollar should have remained in circulation.  People are not accessing the money because of the bond notes.  We need assurance as we finalise debate on the Bill that the US dollar that we are saying is equivalent to the bond note, if we had done that in 2008 and said one quintillion was equal to US$1, we could have been somewhere.

We are now eroding the US dollar account and eventually, we are going to hear that all our accounts now have bond notes.  Our US dollars should not disappear from our accounts because we use them for travelling, paying school fees and importing goods.  How best can we access our US dollars without being controlled by the RBZ?  I thank you.

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