HON. PROF. M. NCUBE: First of all, I would like to thank the Hon. Member Mliswa for mentioning that he likes the ZWL. We like that and what we are doing to make sure that we can catch up with inflation is that we are having discussions on how to improve salaries. We are taking into account the current inflationary levels and the hike in prices in our shops. I can assure the Hon. Member that in reviewing salaries, we are taking into account the levels of inflation and the hike in prices. Also, what we have done as a Government is to allow private players and citizens to bring in basic commodities duty free. This is designed to make sure that we put down pressure on price hikes. We also introduce further competition into the market and we have seen some monopolies trying to take advantage of the situation. We want to make sure that they are not successful in doing that. So both the duty free strategy in terms of importation of basic materials and commodities and the increase in salaries and what we are working on will go a long way in improving the purchasing power of salaries for our civil servants. I thank you.
HON. MOKONE: Thank you Madam Speaker. I would like to find out from the Hon. Minister. We have seen so many tricks that you have tried to employ to resuscitate the economy but it is not working. Why can you not dollarize once and for all? You are saying that you have given people leeway to go outside the country and get goods – how are they going to get those goods when they are paid in RTGs? Thank you.
HON. PROF. M. NCUBE: Thank you Hon. Mokone for your question. She basically said – why do we not US dollarize? That is a very bad idea to only accept USD in our country. At the moment, you have choice. We have dual currency in the main and that is wonderful. If you decide you want to accept USD only, obtain the USD. It is up to you and you have a choice to do that. That does not exist in other countries but we also want to make sure that our own ZWL is circulating and it is our accounting currency.
Let me further explain what will happen under US dollarization which is what happened during the Unity Government. What happened is that there was deflation and deflation means that we had negative growth and that was totally undesirable. We also had an increase in bad debts and that is why we ended up creating ZAMCO to clean up the problem that was created by the USD. The competitiveness of our industry was basically shut down. We just became a nation of importers and we de-industrialised and that destroyed our industry which has only been resuscitated by the introduction of the Zimbabwe dollar during the Second Republic.
Madam Speaker Ma’am, do you not think that it was ironic that during the USD regime, we had no foreign currency. We had no reserves. We could not even pay our foreign debts. We only began paying our foreign debts after introducing the Zimbabwe dollar. It has given us the leeway to do what we do. What we did during the Unity Government, we could not fix our roads. We borrowed money from South Africa to do the Plumtree-Harare-Mutare Road. This time around, we are not borrowing, we are using our own resources and that capability has been afforded by the introduction of our own domestic currency. If you introduce the USD only, tomorrow you will wipe out the banking sector completely because you have to convert all those Zim dollar balances into USD. You will wipe out the bank balances of companies. Is that what you want? You will create a serious situation if you adopt the USD in this country. It is a very bad idea. No Minister of Finance should want that because it means you are walking on one macroeconomic tool when the toolbox is incomplete. You only have fiscal policy but no monetary policy. So, it is a bad idea. I thank you.
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