Zimbabwe’s lost moment of economic sanity: Why the Biti years still haunt Chinamasa and Ncube

The recently presented national budget arrives in a climate that feels eerily familiar. Zimbabweans have once again been told to tighten belts that no longer exist. Austerity has returned in new language but with the same substance.

The cost of living has risen at a pace that outstrips wages. Civil servants are struggling to survive. Businesses are navigating a currency system that inspires neither confidence nor clarity.

This is not a new chapter but rather a continuation of the House of Hunger circumstances that defined much of the tenures of Patrick Chinamasa and Mthuli Ncube.

Both men, though intelligent and experienced, ended up presiding over periods marked by shrinking real incomes, erratic monetary reforms, currency uncertainty and a State that repeatedly demanded sacrifice from citizens while shielding politically connected interests.

Chinamasa’s years became synonymous with the quiet reintroduction of money creation through Treasury Bills. These instruments ballooned domestic debt and fuelled the eventual collapse of parity between electronic balances and real United States dollars.

Poverty deepened as cash shortages worsened and businesses closed. Ncube’s promises of modernisation and technocratic renewal soon collided with the political realities of unilateral governance. His reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar produced a cascade of inflationary shocks.

Prices rose weekly, parallel market rates became the real reference point and citizens endured an austerity that offered no corresponding sense of hope. Both ministers confronted structural decay, but neither could overcome the political forces that demanded optics over honesty.

It is against this backdrop of recurring hardship that Zimbabweans increasingly cast their minds back to the period from 2009 to 2013 when Tendai Biti served as Minister of Finance under the Government of National Unity.

It was the only time in recent memory when policy stability felt real, when shops stayed stocked without the need for cross-border hustles, when salaries held value and when the State operated with something approaching fiscal honesty.

To understand why the Biti years are so frequently invoked as a benchmark, one must contrast them with the tenures of Chinamasa and Ncube. All three men inherited toxic economic environments, but their responses differed sharply.

Zimbabwe’s long crisis is as much a story of political power as it is a story of macroeconomic choices. Biti happened to operate in a political window that demanded discipline and restrained excess.

Chinamasa and Ncube operated in the typical environment of unilateral ZANU PF rule where short-term political survival routinely overrides technocratic sense.

When Biti took office in 2009, Zimbabwe had just emerged from a nightmare of hyperinflation so extreme that the Zimbabwe dollar no longer functioned.

Dollarisation was introduced before he arrived, but Biti cemented it through rigid adherence to cash budgeting. His mantra was simple. We eat what we kill. Government spending could not exceed revenue. Borrowing was minimal. Off-budget antics were curtailed or exposed.

These choices did not produce miracles but they produced predictability. In a country starved of trust, predictability is a luxury. Monthly fiscal bulletins became public documents.

Donors re-engaged because they trusted the ministry to observe basic accounting principles. Civil servants, although underpaid, were paid on time. People could plan. Stability itself became prosperity.

The rebound in mining and agriculture amplified the benefits. Platinum and gold production rose sharply, and tobacco farmers recovered because they were paid in United States dollars.

Although the controversial Marange diamond fields leaked enormous value through elite capture, even the partial remittances helped fund the fiscus. Zimbabweans felt the buoyancy in their pockets not because incomes were high but because their money held value.

The GNU also reduced political risk. ZANU PF and the MDC, though ideologically distant, constrained each other. Forced cooperation temporarily produced rational governance.

Contrast this with Patrick Chinamasa who inherited the post-GNU landscape after 2013. He walked into a treasury suffocated by wage costs, collapsing industry and an unrestrained political appetite for expenditure.

Chinamasa recognised the structural problems. He spoke openly about the bloated civil service, the unsustainable wage bill and the need to rein in spending.

Yet he lacked the political cover to implement what he knew to be necessary. His attempt to retire civil servants above 65 was immediately reversed by political intervention. His push for austerity within the State was undermined by the same actors who demanded its introduction.

Devoid of political support, Chinamasa resorted to desperate measures. Treasury Bills became the instrument of choice, allowing government to create money without printing it. These IOUs flooded the system, ballooned domestic debt and quietly reintroduced money creation by stealth.

The banks became conduits for State borrowing that had no relation to productive capacity. The result was predictable. Liquidity shortages returned. Balances in accounts lost parity with real cash.

This was the origin of the bond note crisis and the painful realisation that electronic dollars were not the same as United States dollars. Trust evaporated.

By the time Chinamasa left office, the country was drowning in a confidence deficit far worse than the fiscal deficit he tried to address.

Then came Mthuli Ncube, a respected academic whose promise of technocratic excellence briefly energised the nation in 2018. He arrived with a vocabulary of reform. He promised macroeconomic stabilisation, currency rationalisation and the discipline of market-friendly policies.

At first he pursued orthodox measures. He implemented the Transitional Stabilisation Programme. He introduced a two percent tax to bridge revenue gaps. He even forced a temporary fiscal surplus. These moves suggested seriousness.

However, the fundamental flaw remained. Policy could not be insulated from political imperatives. Ncube reintroduced the Zimbabwe dollar in 2019, insisting it was backed by fundamentals, yet the timing was politically driven rather than economically driven.

Without deep institutional reforms and without the confidence that had characterised the Biti years, the new currency collapsed almost immediately. Parallel markets returned with vengeance. Prices soared.

Weekly exchange rate movements became part of the national anxiety. The government accused market actors of sabotage while the public accused the government of arrogance. Both accusations missed the point. Confidence is not commanded. It is earned.

Ncube’s tenure also became defined by contradictions. He spoke the language of discipline but tolerated large quasi-fiscal interventions by the central bank. He defended the auction system as transparent while it quietly supported a privileged elite through preferential rates.

He announced growth figures that bore little resemblance to lived reality. Like Chinamasa, he faced a ruling establishment that prioritised political optics over economic coherence.

Where Biti had been insulated by the GNU to some extent, Ncube found himself constrained by an executive that required economic policy to serve short-term political stability.

The nostalgia for Biti’s era is therefore not mere sentimentality. It is a reminder that stability is possible when politics is forced to behave.

The Biti model succeeded because it removed the State from the currency printing business and forced government to live within the boundaries of its revenue. It succeeded because there was transparency.

It succeeded because the central bank was prevented from playing the role of fiscal agent. It succeeded because politics had been humbled by crisis and by the GNU arrangement that prevented unilateral action.

Zimbabwe’s tragedy is that this lesson has never been internalised. The country keeps returning to the twin sins of monetary creation and political interference. Until these are resolved, no finance minister, however brilliant, can deliver sustainable prosperity.

Biti may not have been perfect. He had limited room to restructure debt, limited tools to attract large investment and limited leverage over diamond revenue.

Yet within those constraints he delivered the closest thing Zimbabweans have experienced to macroeconomic sanity in two decades.

The question is not why Biti performed well. It is why successive administrations have failed to replicate the one period when policy coherence was actually achieved. Chinamasa and Ncube had intellect and experience.

What they lacked was political insulation and the authority to impose discipline. Zimbabwe’s economic crisis is therefore not a problem of talent but a problem of governance.

Until political actors embrace restraint and transparency, every finance minister will inherit a poisoned chalice.

Zimbabweans remember the Biti years because for once the system worked, however imperfectly. It proved that Zimbabwe does not lack potential. It lacks accountability.

Gabriel Manyati is a Zimbabwean journalist and analyst delivering incisive commentary on politics, human interest stories, and current affairs.