Zimbabwe’s government living beyond its means – Mangudya
Zwnews.com
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangwagwa’s administration is on another spending storm as the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) Governor says the country has 3-4 weeks foreign reserve remaining.
The administration is under fire for hiring United States of America President Donald Trump allies at Brian Ballard Partners to mend its badly tainted image in Washington on a contract worth US$500 000.
Ballard, a top fundraiser for Trump’s campaigns, and the firm’s other lobbyists will counsel Zimbabwe on “communication with U.S. government officials, U.S. business entities, and non-governmental audiences,” according to a disclosure filing.
On Monday, 4 March 2019 the RBZ Governor John Mandudya said the government was living beyond its means by spending more than it has. Grilled by the Parliament Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Tendai Biti, RBZ boss was in agreement with the committee’s oversight role on checking government expenditure and putting it in its spending tracks.
Asked by the committee how much foreign reserves the central bank has? Mangudya said “We have US$500m in foreign reserves to cover three to four weeks.”
The Mnangagwa administration has a tendency of borrowing loans to finance its extravagant use of public funds without oversight that has seen the country’s domestic and foreign debt ballooning to about 9, 3 billion.
Recently President Mnangagwa’s administration came under fire for using expensive chartered flights at a time when the majority of Zimbabweans are wallowing in poverty.
On the RBZ’s foreign loans, Mangudya confessed that the figures amount to US$985m, all contracted by the central bank. The bulk of the funding has been sourced from: AfreximBank US$641m; PTA Bank US$152m; Banco de Mozambique US$25m; AfDB US$15m; PTA Reinsurance Corp US$9m.
Political analyst Pedzisai Ruhanya chided the ZANU PF government for claiming that it has no money to pay civil servants and to address the rot in public infrastructure, but it pays US$500 000 to a public relations group in Washington DC to clean its ‘image’. He orders the regime to behave lawfully and not attract the bad images internationally.
