ZANU-PF says sanctions have cost Zimbabwe $42 billion

The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front says sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe more than a decade ago have cost the country some US42 billion over the past 12 years.

According to the party manifesto unveiled by ZANU-PF leader Robert Mugabe on Friday last week Zimbabwe lost US$36 million a year in donor support and $79 million a year in loans from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

Negative publicity scared away potential creditors and reduced commercial loans by US$431 million a year.

The sanctions also saw the country’s domestic gross product decrease from US$7.499 billion in 2000 to US$4 billion in 2010 largely due to the interruption in trade and constraints in manufacturing and general economic activities.

The party said while the country had lost a lot of revenue through sanctions, the same countries that imposed sanctions have poured in US$2.6 billion in the past four years through local NGOs “to support nefarious activities that have been camouflaged by sanitised language of humanitarian and development assistance to cover up sinister regime-0change intentions”.

It said that because of the flood of donors, Zimbabwe now had more than 3 000 non-governmental organisations which was “scandalously disproportionate to the country’s population”.

Although the manifesto says the sanctions manifested themselves as financial, trade, cultural, academic, sport embargoes, diplomatic isolation, travel bans, freezing of financial accounts of the national leadership, influential individuals in business community and strategic entities, it did not state how much had been seized from the national leaders.

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