Zim has no plan to adopt SA rand

THE Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was not considering the use of the rand to anchor its worthless currency, the central bank said yesterday.

This follows a suggestion by President Kgalema Motlanthe on an SABC Sunday broadcast that it ‘may be practical for [Zimbabwe] to enter into an arrangement with the Reserve Bank here and allow the rand to become the common currency’ to help Zimbabwe’s crippled economy, now that a government of unity was in place.
Gideon Gono, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, told Business Report on Monday that a formal bi-monetary arrangement with South Africa ‘is not an option we are considering’, adding: ‘I have not exercised my mind on this issue.’
Gono said his recent statement on monetary policy did not refer to using the rand to anchor the Zimbabwean dollar.
Gono gave no updated inflation figures in his policy statement, but did say that broad money supply growth had risen from 81 000 per cent in January last year to 658 billion per cent in December, according to the Zimbabwe Independent. This is an indication of the rate at which the central bank is printing money – at a time when the real economy is shrinking.
Gono also denied knowledge of a document bearing his name, which describes the rand as ‘the naturally obvious currency of choice to anchor the Zimbabwean dollar’.
SA Reserve Bank spokesperson Samantha Henkeman declined to comment on Motlanthe’s suggestion, but said the bank had ‘not been formally approached’.
– Business Report