FALL IN RTGS VALUE AND THE DECIMATION OF LIVELIHOODS
Upon his appointment to take charge of the Treasury on 7 September 2018 Professor Mthuli Ncube’s immediate task was to stabilize the country’s currency among other interventions to ensure economic recovery. According to his boss, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the target was ‘to grow, modernize and mechanize our economy with the stated aim ‘to transform our people into middle income citizens in the next five years, that is, by 2023 (Reuters, 7 September 2018). Three years down the line, the question on every citizen’s lips is, “How far?” While for some, this is an academic or even political question, for the generality of the ordinary citizenry this has now become a matter of life and death. It makes the difference between having a decent meal on the table or not, to send children to school or not, to access healthcare or not, which to all intents and purposes can be summed up in the question to live or to die.
A few days ago, on 11 October 2021, Zimbabwe’s industry body, CZI raised the red flag amidst an accelerated decline in value of the Zimbabwe dollar against the United States dollar. Unless ‘well-considered policy measures’ are urgently implemented, the Zimbabwe dollar ‘is now in real peril,’ they submitted. The implications of this to an already suffering ordinary populace are too ghastly to contemplate. The Zimbabwe dollar is the currency in which the entire civil service, for instance, is paid. The same applies to the majority of workers in the private sector. In fact, it is the currency that the government has directed to be used in all business transactions. Its accelerated decline in value in recent months only exacerbates an already bad situation. Teachers, nurses and pensioners have, before the further decline in the value of the currency, over the years bemoaned their starvation wages and in some cases declared incapacity to go to work. The current fall in currency value spells doom for them and many others in similar situations.
Two days ago, a secondary school in Matabeleland North sent S.O.S to parents indicating that it is ‘struggling to make ends meet.’ In the exact words of the headmaster, ‘prices of bread, beef, chicken and mealie-meal have risen to unimaginable levels.’ Similarly, another headmaster from Midlands Province, wrote to parents to pay fees as, in his words, ‘the economic situation is deteriorating as prices continue to increase rapidly.’ These are not isolated cases. They are a microcosm of the obtaining situation across the length and breadth of the country. What is tragic about this is that the parents to whom schools send S.O.S are equally affected. Their already inadequate incomes are heavily eroded by the free-fall in the value of the local currency. The hunger that stalks boarding school equally stalks most low-income households with no solution in sight.
What is most worrying is that in the face of this multifaceted assault on people’s livelihoods, the responsible authorities do not seem to have any solution. If anything, the CZI puts the blame for the tailspin in the local currency’s value squarely on the door of the RBZ which did not adhere to what was agreed upon at the inception of the forex auction system. This leads to distortions of the auction due to lagging supply and inefficiencies. We will not be blamed if we surmise that all this may be to create loopholes for corrupt activities by a few elites to the detriment of the generality of the masses. We therefore call for an immediate end to this.