Zimbabwe has revealed that it will be calculating its foreign exchange reserves, gold and loans to arrive at a figure of tradeable currency as it readies itself to re-circulate a new version of the Zim dollar.
The news comes after the recent announcement by the country’s minister of finance, Mthuli Ncube, that the local dollar, abandoned in 2009 because of hyper-inflation, will be reintroduced as a currency to trade with beyond Zimbabwe’s borders.
At last count the bonded notes, which were introduced for local internal use only, were trading at parity to the dollar with an exchange rate of about 10-$1.
Once the new Zim dollar has been formally reintroduced into the economy, it will expectedly replace bonded notes and the so-called real-time gross settlement dollar which was introduced by the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa in a bid to deal with the country’s cash shortages.
However, with inflation again sitting at levels higher than those that precipitated the withdrawal of the Zim dollar a decade ago, forcing the country to switch to currencies like the Greenback and the rand, expectations are that a new variant of Zimbabwe’s denomination could collapse before it’s properly launched.
