ZiG inflation, pegged at 7%, "helped to end instability", said IMF. Yes but by ZiG a phantom and paying slave wages! W Mukori

 "The International Monetary Fund says the introduction of a bullion-backed currency by Zimbabwe has helped to end the instability that had plagued the economy," reported Bloomberg.

"The ZiG official exchange rate has so far remained stable, ending a bout of macroeconomic instability in the first three months of the year," the Fund said in an emailed statement Wednesday following an Article IV review.

"Assuming that macro-stabilization is sustained, cumulative inflation in the remainder of the year is projected at about 7%.”

The ZiG is a phantom currency - now you see it now you don’t! How can something that is not there lose value! The regime has made it so, so it does not lose it value. 

The IMF should have inquired how many ordinary Zimbabweans have actually ever had the ZiG note in their pocket! 

The need to use the local currency in parallel with the foreign currency was to fill the gap born out of the need for small change and to enable those with no access to the foreign currency to carry out their business transactions. The ZiG has become readily available as eco-cash. Zimbabwe has become a nation of informal traders and how many of them have access to swipe machines. 

Of course, Zimbabwe can have a stable local currency and pay its workers a living wage by reviving the country’s economy. Decades of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption has left the country’s economy in ruins. The country’s hyperinflation was fuelled by the rat race of soaring wages to catch soaring prices chasing fewer and fewer goods and services due to the collapsing economy.

Zanu PF is containing ZiG inflation by imposing a phantom currency, squeeze out the ordinary people out of all forms of economic actives, pay teachers, nurses and other low ranking civil servants peanuts! The regime has tamed inflation but at the price of millions of ordinary Zimbabweans are living in abject poverty with no clean running water, no electricity, basic services such as education and health care. 

And as long as nothing is done to stamp out the mismanagement, corruption and the lawlessness at the heart of the economic ruin, the country will continue to sink deeper and deeper into the economic and political abyss. Zimbabwe will remain a failed state, million doomed to live and die in abject poverty, or be it with 7% inflation rate and not the 500 billion percent of 2008!Only an idiot would accept this!

The trouble with these IMF buffoons is that they take the same blinked approach in the assessment of a country like Zimbabwe as the take in their assessment of the economic performance of a country like Japan with healthy and functioning democratic institutions. And so they look at the 7% inflation as proof of macro-economic stability and sustainable growth. This is nonsense macro-economic stability achieved by sacrificing millions of ordinary people and doing nothing to revive the economic ruin is socially, morally and politically unsustainable!