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Mr Busisa Moyo

Senior Business Reporter
THE Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) and other stakeholders in the private sector are working jointly to come up with practical interventions to address the current liquidity crisis.

CZI president Mr Busisa Moyo told journalists during a press conference in Bulawayo last week that the liquidity crisis is impacting negatively on industrial productivity.

Bankers’ Association of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Mines, Zimbabwe Economic Law Society, farmer organisations among others organisations are involved in the crafting of a position paper to address the prevailing economic challenges.

“We’ve got a current exercise that’s going on to give a private sector view on what intervention should be taken to ameliorate the current liquidity crisis because we’re in a crisis in terms of cash.

“We feel it as business because the people (workers) are leaving the factory and spend endless hours away from work stations in queues looking for cash; this is a problem now that’s affecting even the productivity as employees would be away looking for cash,” he said.

Mr Moyo said the current account deficit is causing depletion of nostro balances as well as cash challenges in the economy as more money is being spent on imports than exports.

If left unabated, he said, the cash crisis could even undermine Statutory Instrument 64 of 2016 the Government has put in place to control the importation of goods that are available locally.

“So this paper that we’re going to release jointly with other private sector will top two issues like bond notes. We’ll give a view on bond notes as private sector jointly. We’ll also talk about increasing Rand circulation versus full adoption of the Rand because some have called for full adoption of the rand but Government has clearly stated that we’re in a multicurrency environment and that will persist for a long time to come.

“Perhaps what we should be looking at is how do we increase Rand circulation to ease cash shortages and also so that we’ve a softer currency to work with,” he said.

Mr Moyo said the private sector would also look at stimulating exports and reducing imports. Figures from the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency have shown that the country exported, in the first five months of the year, products worth $949 million compared to imports amounting to $2,07 billion.

In 2015, Zimbabwe closed the year with exports amounting to $2.7 billion against imports of $6 billion, showing a $3.3 billion trade deficit.

Mr Moyo said the relationship between Zimbabwe exports and imports is out of balance and it is imperative to address the situation.

“The fundamental problem of this country is imports and exports that relationship is out of balance. . .even if we get borrowings from the International Monetary Fund within a couple of months we’ll be back in problems,” he said.

He said the country also needed to take bold moves to attract the much needed Foreign Direct Investment.