Zimbabwe central bank borrows $985 million from African banks

Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank has borrowed $985 million from African banks including Mozambique’s central bank and the African Export and Import Bank to purchase fuel and other critical imports, governor John Mangudya said today.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of a severe dollar crunch and last month ditched the 1:1 dollar peg for surrogate bond notes and electronic dollars, merging them into a lower-value transitional currency called the RTGS dollar.

Mangudya said the loans would be repaid from future gold earnings and had a tenure of between three and five years.

“These loans are well structured facilities contracted last year,” he told a parliamentary committee.

Mangudya also said government borrowing from the central bank reached $2.99 billion in December, about three times its permissible overdraft limit.

The government has promised to curb borrowing in 2019 as part of reforms to revive the southern African economy, after the budget deficit soared last year following a spike in spending ahead of elections.

Eyebrows were raised last week when neighbouring Botswana promised Zimbabwe a credit line of one billion pula (about US$100 million) with some skeptics saying Zimbabwe was being bailed out by its poor “cousin”.

According to ranking complied by World Atlas, using 2017 International Monetary Fund data, Botswana is Africa’s 5^th richest country in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita way above Zimbabwe which is ranked 32.

Mozambique is ranked 47 out of the 54 African countries. – TR/Own

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