Ghost workers and Bond Notes, ZANUPF continues to blunder

Dementia and derangement seem not to go away from the motherland; the citizen craves a policy blunder free week. The previous weeks and days have not been different, a quick reminder that policy blundering is part of Mugabe and ZANUPF's DNA.  

First is the issue of bond notes, the RBZ Governor announced in his Mid-Term Monetary Policy presentation that a further 300 million worthy of bond notes will be injected into the economy.

As a matter of fact the ones injected into circulation under the initial 200 Million dollar facility did not solve or ease liquidity crunch.

Counting the costs and questioning the benefits 14 months later, the PDP notes that the scheme has caused no good but damage.

The Bond Notes have displaced the few United States dollars that had remained in circulation, ZANUPF had been warned that Gresham's Law of bad money displacing good money would apply, as usual they ignored.

Companies are now failing to import, instead they now have to refer their clients to companies across the borders.

Introduction of bond notes also sent wrong signals into the economy resulting in price hikes including on basics like cereals and cooking oil. Some shops display different prices for the US dollar against the bond note a sign that the claim by both the Governor and the President that they have powers to determine exchange rates through a Statutory Instrument is in itself a fallacy.

Extending the bond note agenda means an unrepentant violation of the country's constitution which states that the state can only borrow through parliament. The debt relating to the bond notes will now stand at half a billion, money borrowed with no parliament approval.

The debt crisis in the country is visibly beyond the capacity of the Ministry of Finance, digging a bigger whole is irrational.

The term sheets for the bond are also not available for anyone to see, we highlighted in our previous statements our reservations on the existence of the bond in the first place.

Fundamentally the illusion that you can monetise your failures and flaws through a fake scheme is just but a waste of time, creating a lie and then believing the lie is a sustainable economic plan.

The government must face it and pay back the money stolen from RTGS balances at the RBZ.

What is needed is an active policy scenario focusing on supply side solutions, at the end of the day a currency is a reflection
of a country's exports against its imports.   

Then there is Mugabe's recent order to reinstate over 2000 so called Youth Officers on the government payroll.

The PDP is irked by leaders who act the opposite when the situation demands otherwise; the government has been struggling with a huge wage bill which gobbles over 90% of the total budget.

This is part of the reason why government introduced bond notes to monetise their deficits.

Expenditure retrenchment is therefore an imperative under these circumstances; we have always suggested weeding out of ghost workers as the starting point of expenditure retrenchment.

Some sections of ZANUPF realised our point made sense hence the retrenchment of the so-called youth officers.

Our position has always been that the ghost workers are a deliberate mechanism to rig elections; Mugabe's move confirms our assertion.

With an election a few months away Mugabe views economic reform as secondary to the pursuit of a narrow agenda of self-aggrandisement and power retention. His government has a track record of paying non-existent individuals. The Auditor-General's reports have always captured this fact.

A political solution is the foundation to dealing with the crisis therefore Zimbabweans must strengthen the idea of convergence and liquidity an establishment of mediocrity.
 
Together Another Zimbabwe is Possible