By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE latest episode of the financial elites’ dodgy dance around the national currency issue involves foregrounding the opinion of one Amarakoon Bandara of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at the Annual Congress of the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC) in Victoria Falls in late June 2015.
Bandara’s presentation at the ZNCC Victoria Falls conference resulted in the following newspaper headlines:
‘Exiting dollarisation won’t be easy: UN official’, The Herald Business, June 30 2015;
‘RBZ rules out capacity to bring back Zim dollar’, Sunday News Business, June 28 2015; and
‘Zim dollar return demands citizens’ confidence’, Standard Business, June 28 2015.
All three stories used UNDP’s presentation to justify the absence of a national currency for Madzimbahwe and the entrenchment of the US dollar as its substitute.
It is important to review briefly the public excuses which have been put forward since 2009 to justify the absence of a national currency.
The first position was driven by the MDC factions and their regime change allies.
It personalised the currency issue by blaming Dr Gideon Gono, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, dismissing the call for strategic plans to restore our own money as ‘Gono’s crazy idea’.
The August 23 2009 headline in The Standard newspaper summed up this position: ‘Biti shoots down Gono’s Zimdollar Revival Plan: There is only one Finance Minister in Zimbabwe’.
The next phase, around 2010, blamed the people, claiming that the people of Zimbabwe were so traumatised by their memories of the financial terror of 2007-2008 that they would never recover enough to contemplate the restoration of a national currency.
When this claim was challenged, the third phase of excuses was reached.
A national currency was not feasible until production reached 60 percent capacity up from 10 percent in 2008.
I challenged these predictions by arguing they were saying we would reach 60 percent capacity in the production of eggs before we even had the chicks. The financial sector’s faulty assumption was that a national currency was not itself an integral part of a strategic recovery plan.
Sure enough, from 2011 to 2014, the economy began to slide backwards, as the worst effects of reliance on US dollar became more obvious.
The fourth phase was even more puzzling to most Zimbabweans.
The financial elite ruled out the restoration or creation of a national currency indefinitely while at the same time admitting that reliance on the US dollar made nonsense of any claim by the policy makers to be engaged in crafting a fiscal policy and a monetary policy.
Since 2009, national budgets have been based on theory and speculation.
The fifth stage was the propagation of the theory that the absence of a national currency and a normal national budget was not the problem.
The problem was the revenue authority’s failure to collect tax from sources where most of the US dollars were circulating: the informal sector, resettled farmers and lately, the churches!
We were told that the informal sector was sitting on US$14 billion.
The sixth and latest phase is that it is not the national currency itself which is being ruled out.
Rather it is the ability or capacity of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and the people of Zimbabwe to restore a national currency which is being ruled out.
So Amarakoon Bandara came to the ZNCC Congress to declare that there was neither capacity nor need in Zimbabwe to set up a new national currency because no country has ever been able to do so after adopting the US dollar as its own currency.
Bandara is also reported to have said that it would be perfectly normal for Zimbabwe to continue using the US dollar as its own money because Panama has been doing so since 1904 and Ecuador and El Salvador also adopted the US dollar before Zimbabwe did.
The paradox this time is that from 1990 to-date Madzimbahwe have been told repeatedly that donors were here to build the capacity of most of their national institutions.
In fact the World Bank brought in the Capacity Building Foundation and the Capacity Building Fund.
Where did all that capacity go?
Given the preceding shifting positions, Madzimbahwe need to be reminded of the following:
The latest admission by RBZ Deputy Governor Dr Kuphukile Mlambo at the June 2015 ZNCC Congress was that:
“The central bank is not in any discussion to bring back the Zim dollar, rather we are taking every action to ensure that we decommission the Zim dollar.
“We are taking every action to build confidence in the multicurrency system.”
In other words, it is easier for the RBZ to build our national confidence in other people’s currencies than it is to attempt to build confidence in our own.
This means the conclusion that there is no capacity to create a new national currency is theoretical.
The RBZ and Treasury have never exerted any effort in that direction.
So they do not know about real capacity.
The idea for a national currency has never been tested.
Talking of UNDP gurus, the late Dr Bernard Chidzero was a UNDP guru.
He was the one who dragged Zimbabwe into ESAP, just like the Greek gurus who also dragged Greece into the current financial terror the Greek people are facing today.
The examples of Panama, Ecuador and El Salvador cannot be reassuring for Madzimbahwe.
John Perkins in his Confessions of an Economic Hitman dedicated chapters 17 and 24 to Panama and Ecuador as classic examples of countries where the US carried out illegal regime changes quite easily through the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and multinational corporations.
On July 31 1981, the CIA assassinated Omar Torrijos, the president of Panama who had successfully negotiated the return of the Panama Canal and Panama Zone from US ownership to Panamanian ownership.
In 1989, US forces invaded Panama and captured its president, Manuel Noriega, by January 3 1990.
On May 24 1981, the CIA had also assassinated the president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos, for advocating what the West today condemns as ‘resource nationalism’ which we call indigenisation.
I am not saying that adoption of the US dollar as national currency was the direct cause of the regime changes and assassinations in Panama and Ecuador.
But I am saying use of the US dollar as national currency made it easy for the US to control the economies of Ecuador and Panama and contributed to the instability and infiltration which facilitated illegal regime changes and assassinations of heads of state by foreign forces.
Why would a UNDP expert recommend such countries as examples for Zimbabwe to emulate today?
A national currency is the main instrument for controlling the circulation of foreign money.
And the control of money is an integral aspect of national security.