The Sunday News
Harare Bureau
ZIMABWE is going ahead with a plan to settle its US$1,8 billion arrears with international financial institutions by October 2016 despite a spirited domestic and overseas campaign to sabotage that effort, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Dr John Mangudya has said. In 2015, global financiers meeting in Lima, Peru accepted Government’s debt clearance plan which sees Harare using various mechanisms to settle its dues to the IMF, World Bank and African Development Bank.
Zimbabwe will be eligible for fresh capital once the plan is implemented. The US$100 million arrears with the IMF will be settled through Special Drawing Rights, while the World Bank and AfDB will get their dues via money from bridge loans and global finance markets.
Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa and Dr Mangudya have been working on that, culminating in the African Export-Import Bank and Lazard — a New York Stock Exchange-listed financier — agreeing to mobilise US$1,1 billion for the World Bank arrears.
But British parliamentarian Ms Kate Hoey has been trying to get UK foreign minister Boris Johnson to block Zimbabwe’s plans. And back home, opposition Progressive Democratic Party leader Mr Tendai Biti has been advocating the same in pretty much the same way his former boss at MDC-T, Mr Morgan Tsvangirai, campaigned for Western economic sanctions against Zimbabwe.
Joining Mr Biti in that bandwagon of saboteurs are Western embassies in Harare, NGOs and other characters. In an interview with our Harare Bureau last week, Dr Mangudya said, “The Lima Plan is a work in progress. This is all I can say for now. We are aware of the lobby against what we are doing, but this will not stop us from doing our work.”
United Kingdom-based political analyst Mr Nick Mangwana said the anti-Lima lobby undermined Zimbabwe’s right to engage the IMF, World Bank and African Development Bank. Zimbabwe is a member of all three institutions.
“We have to note that Zimbabwe is one of the biggest shareholders of the African Development Bank South of the Sahara, and is entitled to these facilities. It is not only accessing them because of sanctions and arrears. So, whoever is pushing for that to happen is also pushing for Zimbabwe to remain under sanctions.
“The whole purpose of the Lima arrangements is to help alleviate the suffering of the ordinary Zimbabwean. Kate Hoey and her sympathisers are cruel and heartless pseudo democrats who are pursuing an agenda of using Zimbabweans as cannon fodder for a racist and unconstitutional agenda.”
On Ms Hoey, Mr Mangwana, said: “She has always been a known Rhodesian sympathiser working in cahoots with that lobby. What is very painful to accept is the other Zimbabweans who help that cause.
“On one hand, they deny that Zimbabwe is under sanctions, but the fact that they are pushing hard for Zimbabwe not to access the Special Drawing Rights which it is entitled to shows how hypocritical they are.”
Harare-based political analyst Mr Godwine Mureriwa added: “It is appalling that there are people who are able to show so much hostility and deliberately plan to sabotage their own country.”
