Addressing a POLAD Economic Summit at the HICC in Harare on Thursday, business leaders under the auspices of the Employers Confederation of Zimbabwe (EMCoZ), were unusually blunt with the government as frustrations over the economy grow.

Understandably businesses are not happy that the President and the RBZ decided to kill the multicurrency without consulting them. They probably wouldn’t have minded had the government been able to introduce a stable currency and prove critics who were against the monocurrency system wrong.

Currency has to store value, and in all honesty, the local currency cannot be said to be a store of value.
The currency tends to move in one direction that is downwards. A normal currency must fluctuate — move up or down depending on supply and demand aspects in the economy.
We need to stabilise the currency and if we fail to do so by mid-year or end of the year we have to look at an alternative currency.
EMC0Z’s President Israel Murefu

His frustrations were backed by Zimbabwe Stock Exchange chief executive Justin Bono who blamed the Zimbabwean dollar for the 64% fall in foreign direct investments. He said companies should be allowed to capitalise in foreign currency.

We don’t get investors coming to us anymore to raise money because of currency issues. Those who want to raise money say, ‘look, we don’t know how much to raise because if we say we want this much, then by the time we raise it, the money would have lost value and won’t be sufficient to buy what is needed’