Chinamasa responsible for cash crunch – PDP
The debilitating cash crunch that bank depositors are facing is clear indication of a broader economic crisis which the Mugabe regime is facing and is in large parts responsible for. It further exposes the failure of the ZANU PF government to craft and implement policies which would spur economic recovery since 2013.
What is also very evident from the current liquidity crunch is that the minister of finance, Patrick Chinamasa is raiding the coffers of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) to finance the various obligations of the regime such as salaries. This is because revenue collected by ZIMRA has been dwindling continuously since 2013 and thus there is little available to fund the operations of the desperate government.
With Zimbabwe in a deep economic crisis, most banks are struggling to provide cash and limiting daily withdrawal amounts for individuals and companies. Most ATMs have since run out of cash as the banks try to contain the cash crunch and reserve cash only for their customers.
However, desperate for cash to support the Zanu PF regime, Chinamasa has resorted to raid cash meant for the banking sector leaving both individuals and companies stranded as they fail to make withdrawals.
What a desperate Chinamasa is doing will lead Zanu PF to reintroduce the worthless Zimbabwean dollar so that they print their way out of the current quagmire. This is what the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has long warned against and an increasingly desperate Mugabe is likely to cross the Rubicon and reintroduce the moribund currency and the bond coins have set the ground for this madness.
It is time for Chinamasa to realize that the financial and economic reforms that he has been embarking on since 2013 will not materialize because of his party’s reluctance to realign the existing national laws to the new Constitution.
It is also time for the International Financial Institutions such as the IMF and World Bank to realize that the ZANU PF government is not sincere on reforms and thus it would be futile to give them any bail out.
Desperate for cash, the Zanu PF regime has been window dressing the reform process to please international monetary institutions in the hope to access cash that it so desperately needs but they seem not satisfied with the Zanu PF’s commitment on reforms date and Chinamasa has resorted to raid RBZ coffers.
As the (PDP), we request Parliament and the government auditor general to conduct urgent inquiries into what is happening in the financial sector and at the RBZ, of which failure to undertake these investigations would only lead to a huge disaster for the sector and would plunge the entire banking sector into a huge crisis.
Statement issued by Vince Musewe, People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Secretary for Finance and Economic Affairs
