Many Zimbabweans will remember Finance Minister, Professor Mthuli Ncube’s repeated promise to rein in inflation. He assured the nation that inflation would “fall to 10% or less by the end of the year (2019)”. We are now in March 2020 and inflation has soared to 500% plus!
The IMF said Zimbabwe’s Transitional Stabilisation Programme (TSP), a brain child of Minister Ncube, is “off-track”.
Even ordinary citizens had said from the onset that the programme was doomed to fail because there was nothing in the programme to stamp out corruption, the country’s biggest economic scourge. Indeed, the IMF reported singled out the country’s failure to end corruption as one of the reasons TSP was off-track.
The other reason IMF gave for Zimbabwe’s economic reform failure was that government was surreptitiously printing more and more money to bankroll its ballooning finance public expenditure. The need to print its own money was the real reason why, this time last year, government had hurriedly scrapped the multi-currency system introduced in 2008.
The increase in the volume of money without a corresponding increase in the volume of good and service is one of the sure ways to fuel inflation! Elementary stuff, my dear Professor! One does not need a secondary education to see that, much less a University of Cambridge, no less, professorship!
IMF, WB, AfDB, Paris Club and all the other major financial institutions have all announced that they will not give Zimbabwe any financial assistance until the country implement the necessary reforms to get its economy back on track.
Zimbabwe is a pariah state ruled by corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and murderous thugs. The IMF, WB, etc. are not going to bankroll a pariah state whose economy is doomed to fail. It would be like throwing money in a blackhole; rest assured, you will never catch a shrewd institution like IMF doing such a foolish thing!
“In order to stabilise the exchange rate and hence, to lower inflation, the Government has decided to implement a holistic package of key policy measures. In this regard, a Currency Stabilisation Task Force has been set up,” Finance Minister, Professor Mthuli Ncube has just announced.
Here we go again!
We need to stamp out corruption, to stop printing money, etc. Get the economic fundamentals right! No task force will rein in the country’s runaway inflation and foster economic stability when all the fundamentals for economic stability are all wrong!
The IMF was right, this government's TSP is off-track and what Minister Ncube is going is wasting time pretending the nation can still have low inflation whilst still printing money as if there is no tomorrow!
ReplyDeleteTHE Speaker of Parliament Jacob Mudenda has announced that over 90% of MPs in both houses, including Cabinet Ministers, have declared their assets in line with the requirements of the Privileges Committee.
ReplyDeleteThe Speaker ordered other MPs who had not made their declarations known to Parliament, to do so before the end of next week Thursday or disciplinary action would be taken against them.
The lifestyle audit was necessitated by reports of rampant corruption in government ministries and departments including Parliament.
Who gets to see these declarations? Are one's partner's asset included in the declaration too? Who is tasked to check whether or not the declaration is correct? If the declaration is not correct what then? There are so many questions that have not been answered the whole exercise is yet another drag-net to catch the small fish but not the big ones!