'Multicurrency use was a fight back strategy'

Zimbabwe introduced the use of multi foreign currencies as legal tender in Zimbabwe as a fightback against the attempts to destroy the Zimdollar, Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa said

The Vice President, who is also the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, was responding to New Africa's Editor-at-Large Baffour Ankomah who had said, "In the end, you decided to introduce "enemy currency"as legal tender in Zimbabwe?"

Mnangagwa explaining why Zimbabwe is using the US dollar as legal tender and why the Zimbabwean economy implode. He responded by saying, "This is what happened. In December 2008, the president formed a committee of which I was one of five members. That committee decided that we should introduce a foreign currency or currencies as legal tender in Zimbabwe as a fightback against the attempts to destroy our currency.

"At first we thought we could use the South African rand. So we sent our central bank governor, Gideon Gono, to see his counterpart in South Africa, Tito Mboweni. Mboweni was the governor of the South African Reserve Bank and the first black to hold the post. But he gave us several conditions, which, when we looked at them, we said no, we cannot accept.

"So we looked at the regulations of both the Bank of England and the American Federal Reserve. We studied them both and discovered that we could introduce their currencies as legal tender here without consulting them. Interestingly, these were the very countries at the forefront of the attack on our currency. So in February 2009 we crafted a statement which Patrick Chinamasa, the then acting finance minister, read to the nation, introducing the US dollar and a basket of other currencies as legal tender in Zimbabwe. Since then, I don't think the enemy has found a formula to fight their currency here. This is why in the last three years or so, our economy began to recover, because there is no way that they can fight their own currency."