Zimbabwe One Step Closer To Becoming A Province of South Africa


Death to The Zimbabwe Dollar! Elton Mangoma, minister of Economic Planning from the MDC, announced on Sunday that the Zimbabwe dollar (such as the FIFTY BILLION DOLLAR NOTE pictured here)  has been "suspended" for a year. A lot of commuters are going to be mad as hell, because they had been using these to board commuter omnibuses. But in confirms the timeline I gave in December in my article, Zimbabwe Approaches South Africa to Officially Use The Rand

So, you woke up on Sunday morning to hear that what I revealed to you here in my article in December last year (Zimbabwe Approaches South Africa To Officially Use The Rand) has been proved correct. Yet again.

As I explained it back then, Gono had met with Mboweni to discuss the adoption of the Rand and the conditions laid down by the South Africans were daunting.

Zimbabwe, I told you back then, was required to suspend its own currency for at least six months. (They have done better, with Elton Mangoma, the minister of economic planning, revealing yesterday that the Zimbabwe Dollar has now been officially suspended for a whole year.)

The other condition was the provision of security of some sort for the deal. I passed on to you the information I got that Mugabe and his governor were seriously thinking of mortgaging the country's mineral wealth for this.

It appears they have now settled on the Chiyadzwa diamonds (which were promptly banned and can't now be sold on the open market). The South Africans will probably take them and certify them on a much larger scale than they have been doing now. (Yes, our diamonds have been certified on our behalf by the South Africans for some time now and they are sold in the market as originating from South Africa.

There is nothing much the international market can do to South Africa, seeing as it is the leading nation in diamond mining. A South African company, De Beers, has an international monopoly on diamonds and can manipulate the price to its own advantage if it felt hard done by.

Then there was the issue of trust. The South Africans were not prepared to support budgetary allocations in Zimbabwe. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe would not be able to set monetary policy and would not be the lender of last resort for the government of Zimbabwe.

Hence, just like Biti then announced in his own budget revision last month, all budgetary money, to be disbursed to ministries for their operations, will now be housed at Treasury (meaning the Ministry of Finance) and not at the RBZ as was the case before.

Further, none of the money can be withdrawn by any ministry without the express consent of the Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti. And, of course, there was the minister's Hunter-Gatherer budget, about which he himself said, "From now on, what we gather is what we eat." 

Please take note of the words he used......".....What we eat." That is the whole point of this government, "to eat". Vari kuda kudya mari dzedu chete-chete.

But, to get back to the matter at hand: Most of the conditions for Zimbabwe to be Randified are now met.

Tendai Biti himself has also announced that all government accounts will be held in Rand and all accounting matters will also be Randified

We can now see the trend very clearly. The President of South Africa told the media earlier this year that he saw nothing wrong with Zimbabwe adopting the Rand as its official currency.

The Reserve Bank of South Africa itself refused to comment and only, tellingly, said no "official" approach has been made.

Basically, the possibility was thrown into the ring to gauge public reaction in South Africa. Public opinion having been prepared for the move, we are now seeing an inexorable march towards adopting the Rand openly, officially.

Then, Zimbabwe will forever be a colony again, a province of South Africa. What with the announcement last week that Zimbabweans would no longer need visas to visit South Africa (an announcement that was immediately disowned by the South African Ministry of Home Affairs on their website...)

We are ahead of the pack. Regional-integration-r-us. By the time Africa comes to be a united continent (United States of Africa, is what Gaddafi wants), we would have been one country for ages.

I bet the new mega-country combining Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho (who all already the use the South African Rand), Botswana, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique will be called.......South Africa!

Comments

  1. Denford You have said it all :

    I bet the new mega-country combining Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho (who all already the use the South African Rand), Botswana, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique will be called.......South Africa!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think Zimbabwe will stop after this Step, this is the last base line.A Province of South Africa?
    No.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Being colonised by a fellow brother is much better. There is a lot you share in common, their suffering is also your own suffering. Its not even colonisation, it is building one large family.
    Rather than being colonised by a total alien, whom you got completely nothing in common.Who enjoys your suffering and serves selfish interests. Divided we fall, united we stand.

    ReplyDelete
  4. There is nothing even remotely like family about the relationship of south africa to zimbabwe.
    it is entirely paracitical.they take from zimbabwe, and what do they give back ? lest we forget their actions in the squatters camps last year, when they dismantled them leaving hundreds of thousands vunerable to mob violence and repression, by forced return to their own often more dangerous situations.

    oh no zimbabwe, please think twice about this relationship. a black widow always eats her mate.Zoro said :
    Being colonised by a fellow brother is much better. There is a lot you share in common, their suffering is also your own suffering. Its not even colonisation, it is building one large family.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is really disappointing news. Where does hope for Zimbabwe's future lie? It seems increasingly apparent it's misplaced in Tsvangari.

    ReplyDelete
  6. We can not keep creating ideological cocoons that only result in limiting the parameters on which we can engage ourselves in the dynamics of our future. The view of currencies solitarily as a symbol of nationhood is one such example which takes us back to legacy mentalities. Currency integrations are part of broader processes that emanates from other types of integration. For example the primary objective for European countries to integrate was to achieve political stability, by the late 70s the EU had started to realize the advantages of a common market as characterized by a single monetary unit. Regional economic integration is a natural step in the developmental process for countries which are already unified in other aspects such as ours.

    The deliberation behind a single monetary unit is that it cements political stability through collective formulation of economic policies at regional level. If SADC has to be asked to help Zimbabwe through its self inflicted rebuilding process, why should it not make sense to put in place measures which seek to avoid future mishaps? Why not nip bad policymaking in the bud after all less headaches the better. Functionally it removes the pricing kinks within the member countries, and eliminates turbulence in the currency markets. The EU has grown from several markets to a common 330 million people which can cushion itself against external factors much better than single markets would have!

    In an increasing global economy it is going to be extremely difficult for small countries such as ours to achieve economic and political stability and graduate from the third world.

    In practical terms, private sector Zimbabwe is more South African than even Zimbabwean. The companies forming the cornerstone of our economy are South African and one will be hard pressed to find any major company in any industry that does not have South African roots. Old Mutual and Anglo-American’s sphere of influence in Zimbabwe must have accounted for over half the private sector business at their height.

    Perhaps we need to look at the merits and demerits of joining the Rand Customs Union vs other forms of raising money such as IMF/WB instead of wasting time on how an issue came to be on the national agenda, who put it there, how clean are they.

    ReplyDelete

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