Zimbabwe says strong local currency to anchor economic growth

Zimbabwe is determined to continue putting in place economic fundamentals to strengthen the local currency to anchor the economy’s recovery and growth, an official has said.

Government re-introduced the Zimbabwe dollar last year, and scrapped the use of multi-currencies which had been adopted in 2009.

The multi-currency trading regime has since been re-introduced alongside the local currency.

Finance and Economic Development permanent secretary George Guvamatanga said a strong local currency was a prerequisite for economic growth.

“The biggest mistake that was made before the Transitional Stabilisation Programme (TSP) (2018-2020) was dollarising and then removing your own local currency, that was the biggest mistake that the economy actually made at that particular moment in time and that mistake will never be repeated,” he told a post budget briefing.

“The local currency will anchor the National Development Strategy (NDS1), the local currency will anchor this current budget and we will build this economy on the basis of a strong Zimbabwe dollar.”

Guvamatanga said the NDS1 was succeeding the highly successful TSP launched two years ago and comes to an end this year.

The NDS1 is targeting a Gross Domestic Product growth rate of five percent a year to catapult the country into an upper middle income economy by 2030.

“We are coming from, what we regard, as a very successful implementation of the TSP and the TSP was exactly as it says, meant to stabilise the economy between October 2018 and October 2020; we have then moved from the TSP to the NDS1,” he said.

“The budget that we have presented allows us to build the resilience that we are requiring for a sustainable economic recovery.”-New Ziana

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