These past few days the ZWL to USD exchange rate has been relatively stable but that has not stopped the RBZ from hunting down manipulators whom they blame for causing rate spikes. According to RBZ governor John Mangudya, the central bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) is on the prowl trying to pin down these unnamed individuals and companies responsible for wreaking havoc in the economy and causing the local unit to plummet and it will soon expose them.

Money is the root cause of all evil. Exchange rates are being manipulated because people have money.

That is why the exchange rate rapidly moves from US$1:ZWL200 to US$1:ZWL300 and then to US$1:ZWL400 within a short space of time.
Each day I try to figure out where the money doing rounds on the parallel market is coming from and we now know what is happening.
That is why we had to temporarily stop banks from lending money.
We wanted to see the real culprits pouring money into the parallel market. We monitor the banks to ensure that they have the right systems.
Although the real people who put money on the parallel market are not easy to dictate as they use third parties to do so, our Financial Intelligence Unit is working day and night to flash out these culprits.
Very soon we will expose all their activities and bring them to book.
Our country has a lot of people with delinquent behaviour and I have been wondering where this is coming from and have concluded that our past experiences are now shaping people’s behaviour.
But then we can’t continue living in the past. Let us move forward and build our economy.
Governor Mangudya speaking at Manicaland Stand University

The men in the mirror

The Zimbabwean government, including the RBZ, loves to blame everyone and anyone except themselves when it comes to rating spikes and the Zimbabwean dollar losing value. They have stubbornly refused to acknowledge their role in it all and we are paying the price.

You see there wouldn’t be any money to spend if the RBZ and the government were not printing it and dishing it out. Right now the major drivers of the rate are government contractors who are getting paid in RTGS and splurging the money onto the black market as they seek to convert it to USD in order to preserve value. The government is entirely to blame for all this.

They want to build dams and roads for free without movements in the rate but that is simply not possible. There is a cost to this money for the infrastructure stance they have adopted. They cannot, on one hand, pay contractors in ZWL and then, on the other hand, try to stop these contractors from spending the money. That is not feasible and they probably know it. To try and distract us from this fact they have invented manipulators who they keep threatening to stop and expose.