The Zimbabwe dollar is back…

7 07 2019

The last Zimbabwe dollar invoice through my business in January 2009 – are we heading back there?

Last Monday morning we were greeted with the news that the much dreaded Zimbabwe dollar had made a return.  Then it got worse, much worse as befitting a Monday morning. Only the “new” dollar could be traded within the country. All other official currencies (US dollar, yen, euro, UK pound) have been restricted to use for import purposes only. Those of us with bank accounts in foreign currency (usually US dollars) may not use them to trade within the country. They can be used to import goods otherwise they can only be used to buy Zimbabwe dollars at the official bank rate which, at the time, was less than half the black market rate.

Some background

Back in February 2009 Zimbabwe officially adopted the US dollar as its currency. It had to – inflation was the second highest on record and the largest Zimbabwe dollar note was one hundred trillion dollars (100,000,000,000,000). Inflation stopped and for seven years we enjoyed relative economic stability by our standards. But the government never stopped its excessive spending and by 2016 they were unable to pay salaries which make up some 80% of the budget so they introduced the bond dollar (supposedly backed by a bond from the Afrexim bank in Egypt which was later shown to be a lie) to cover a general shortfall in small change, and lots were printed. Their value was pegged at 1:1 with the US dollar and for a while the general population accepted this. Then the US dollars became more and more scarce until the banks didn’t have any to give out – the government had stolen most of them. The black market began to pick up as the public realised they’d been conned. It really got into gear when the government told us that our bank accounts, which were still listed on the statement as being US dollars, were actually a new currency called RTGS dollars and were still valued at 1:1 with the US dollar.  We were told that if we had hard currency, or were exporting and earned foreign currency, we could open a FCA (foreign currency account) and the money would be kept there for importing, or trading for goods locally that were priced in US dollars. In an import orientated economy such as ours US dollars became more and more valuable so the pressure increased to charge in them. The much derided Finance Minister, Nthuli Ncube, announced that the banks would be able to sell hard currency at the inter-bank rate, i.e. what the government thought the rate should be, which was about half the black market rate. In theory one was able to purchase hard currency at this rate but nobody in their right mind was going to do that except those “with connections” i.e. party fat-cats and their relatives who have been making quick money buying at the low rate and selling at the black market rate. This loop-hole made some people very rich very quickly in the late 2000s.

Inflation was soon above 100% and basic commodities became extortionately expensive for the ordinary folk. Fuel queues became legendarily long (and still are) as filling stations were forced to sell at controlled prices based on the inter-bank exchange rate way below the black market rate. In an unrelated development, power cuts were introduced to compensate for reduced generating capacity from the Lake Kariba hydro scheme – a victim of over development on both the Zambian and Zimbabwean banks of the Zambezi River and the poor rains experienced last season in the catchment area. Compounding this is the 50% reduction of generating capacity at the Hwange thermal power station in the west of the country due to a lack of maintenance and development caused by incompetence and corruption – the power station is built on top of a vast, high quality, coalfield.

Back to the present

The black market exchange rate leaped several points and those outlets selling or marking their products closed for “stocktaking” whilst they figured out what to do. The government directed banks to return money to the Reserve Bank owed to external clients which could not be sent out (as it is in Zimbabwe dollars) thus removing money that could be changed on the black market for hard cash. The black market has since dropped several points as a result. The government has released a propaganda video explaining that having our own currency is a “good thing” even though nobody wants or trusts it. We owe Mozambique and South Africa some US$83 million for imported power and have no way to repay them. The passport office has no money to import the paper and ink to print the backlog of some 240,000 passports. All maize, the staple diet, has to be sold to the government owned Grain Marketing Board (GMB) and there has yet to be an announcement as to how much the local farmers will be paid for their crop which has just been harvested. Will it be equivalent to imported maize? The GMB has been instructed to put 750,000 tonnes of maize to import tender to make up the shortfall from last season’s harvest that was badly affected by poor rains. The President has announced that Zimbabwe has a stockpile of rhino horn and elephant tusks worth US$600 million that he wants to sell, presumably to fund some of the country’s debts, and wants CITES to allow us to do it. They must be horrified.

Will it work?

Attempts to directly control the value of any currency seldom succeed. Most currencies in the world are left to float and find their own value. The memories of the desperate shortages of 2007/8 are still fresh and the distrust of the new currency are deep so acceptance of it is going to be sketchy at best. I have yet to see any announcement of plans to print new notes – if we don’t have money to print new passports how will we have money to print new bank notes? Of course “printing money” these days is much easier than printing notes; a few keystrokes on a computer and suddenly there is a lot more “money” in the fiscus. As cash notes have become scarce so the electronic banking has taken over – mobile phone banking in Zimbabwe is ubiquitous so we have little need for large amounts of cash. However the local population is well aware of this and would prefer money-in-hand, preferably a type they know cannot be fiddled.

There is much more to economic recovery than having one’s own currency. Only a few nations have ever de-dollarized successfully and it requires economic stability to be in place – the Zimbabwean authorities seem to think that this stability will be a consequence of the introduction of our own currency.

The Market Watch website showing the effects of policing

Most people used one of three websites to keep track of the exchange rates over the past several months. One of the more popular ones is shown on the left (a screenshot of my phone on two separate days). I’m not entirely sure how they ascertained the various rates but it’s clear that they have become victims of government pressure as the image on the right only shows the official rate, after the introduction of the Zimbabwe dollar, which is indicated by the line USD/RTGS. OMIR stands for Old Mutual Implied Rate. Old Mutual is a South African banking/insurance group that has a significant presence in Zimbabwe. It is also listed on the London Stock Exchange so it’s possible to get an approximation of the value of the Zimbabwe dollar by comparing what a share is worth in both Zimbabwe and the UK. RTGS stand for Real Time Gross Settlement dollars i.e. electronic transfers. BOND refers to the cash notes that should be equivalent to the RTGS but are not due to short supply. If you find this confusing then you are in the majority.

Also in the news this week has been a report that the Auditor General has noted that Air Zimbabwe (rebranded Zimbabwe Airways) cannot account for the purchase or leasing of three of it’s aircraft; turboprop MA60s. The troubled airline owes US$30 million to foreign creditors and $292 million to various government companies. Getting into a mess of that magnitude must have taken considerable effort. The Auditor General released her report on state enterprises to parliament earlier this week and it makes for depressing reading, not least because very little will come of it.

So will we be heading back to trillion dollar invoices of 2009? It’s difficult to say. In a way I won’t be too upset if we do. It means that we could pay off the bond on our house for a few US dollars – something I missed out on doing back then. Anyway, my computer will be ready (I wrote the software specifically to deal with multiple currencies. The box on the left is an algorithm that converts large numbers to their spoken equivalent so that my staff could explain to customers how much money was owed).


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Waiting for the hammer to fall

24 09 2017

A very expensive hammer – or is it?

Just a pretty average ball pein hammer with an expensive price tag. I’ve just looked on Amazon and one can get a set of three for about £10 and the most expensive one in this style, also with a genuine hickory handle, is £15. Of course we expect to pay more but nearly double? Well that’s the way of Zimbabwe at the moment, that’s right folks, inflation is back!

Zimbabwe produces little these days and imports a lot. Along with a bloated civil service whose wage bill gobbles 80% of the budget and rampant corruption we are in deep trouble. We have a three tier monetary system which in theory is all US dollars but in practice has three different values; money in the bank which is labelled US dollars but will buy the money version, referred to as “cash” at a rate of 1.6 to 1. Then there are bond notes, a local substitute for “cash” which are pegged at the same value as the “cash” but trade at around 1.2 to the dollar. These bond notes are in theory backed by a bond from the Cairo based Afrexim Bank but it was recently revealed that the bond never existed so they are valueless but preferable to having money in the bank. A case of a bird in the hand being worth more than what’s in the bank.

Most outlets have a 3 tier pricing system to reflect the various value rates. For the moment my business doesn’t but that will change tomorrow. In the time that I’ve been writing this blog (about 4 days) Harare fuel pumps have run dry. It’s not surprising as the price for diesel has been hovering around $1.20 per litre for quite a few months now – completely unrealistic considering that they have had to buy the real US$ at a premium of 1.2 during most of that time. Yes, I guess the price is controlled somewhere along the line.

I was, by chance, chatting to a farmer at an agricultural supplies outlet on Friday. He asked if I could grow him some paprika as he was looking for an export crop to stay viable. He mentioned that he’d been pricing steel that morning and by the time he’d gone back to place the order 2 hours later the price had gone up 15%. We are talking a bank transfer price of course. That evening I went to a talk on Bitcoins and how to use them and what the investment opportunities and pitfalls are. The speaker referred to the day as Black Friday in reference to the galloping exchange rate.

A while ago I called my local service manager at the bank. On asking if I could pay for an import of the coir pith we use to propagate seedlings he asked me if we exported anything. No, I replied. Had I deposited any US$ cash recently? No of course I hadn’t – was this really a serious question? Well then, he said, bring in the cash and we can do the transfer. Guaranteed? Yes, guaranteed. This raised the obvious question of how far to trust the banking system. All external payments have to go through the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the very instrument who in no small way has landed us in this mess. To be fair there has been a lot of greed and incompetence driven political pressure on them to just add zeroes to the value of the currency though, with the exception of the governor, a lot of the senior staff were there for the meltdown of the Zimbabwe dollar in 2008 – 9 and one must wonder what their influence is.

It should be evident by now that the USD price tag on the handle of the hammer is not United States Dollars at all but a proxy currency probably better named (nearly) Useless Substitute Dollars and the price of 39.00 is probably quite cheap. The Zimbabwe dollar is back under another name as a lot of people feared when the bond notes were first introduced.

When I started this post on Thursday I thought the title was appropriate. After reading a WhatsApp message this morning from a friend (the full text by Matt Matigari can be read here http://source.co.zw/2017/09/opinion-currency-crisis-art-deception/) I realized that it had been looking decidedly unstable as far back as 2013. The hammer most definitely has already fallen and we have only now heard the sound of the impact.

There are going to be casualties during the course of this next meltdown. An old friend has already lost his job and has no alternative income. He and his wifer may well end up renting our cottage and hopefully renting out their house. We have advised them most definitely NOT to sell as they will likely lose a lot of money in the time it would take to find a smaller property. They have several dogs most of which will have to be euthanized. Those who can will emigrate. Those who cannot will once again be destitute. Companies that depend on imports will likely fold. Money changers will prosper and just maybe, we will pay off the bond on our house for the equivalent of a few dollars – cash. Tighten your seat-belts folks, there’s rough weather ahead.

 


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Déjà-vu – and it’s not good

9 08 2017

NEVER throw away what might be useful

We have a habit in this country of not throwing things away “just in case they might be useful one day”. It’s not without good reason but it can be taken to extremes.

In the days when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia and the country was under blanket sanctions for it’s persistent colonial ways ingenuity ruled. Getting fuel was difficult and just about everything else close to impossible. Car spares were horded and years after we got rid of an old car I still found spares squirreled away “just in case”.

Now that Rhodesia is Zimbabwe and we still have sanctions (but this time targeted against certain odious individuals) spares are once again becoming difficult.  In this case it’s spares for a Husqvarna hedge trimmer we use to trim tobacco and gum tree seedlings – so of course I feel somewhat smug that I kept the remains of a previous hedge trimmer. Just in case.

The shortages this time around are nothing to do with the sanctions but gross incompetence and greed by the ruling regime; the nation has simply run out of money. The bond notes alluded to in other posts are proving to be exactly what everyone feared them to be – a return to the defunct Zimbabwe dollar under another guise. There was never a bond/loan backing them (the Reserve Bank governor simply lied) and now the government has announced that it wants to release another 300m of  them backed by precisely nothing.

Inflation has also made a return. I priced a gum wooden door last week that has increased 50% over the last 4 months despite being made entirely of local products. It is priced in US$ but I’m almost certain that if I asked I could get a discount for “cash” i.e. real US$ notes of around 20% (most people use debit cards or similar devices to pay for items). A potential customer asked me if he could get a discount for bond notes and was told most definitely no. He did not ask if he could get a discount for real cash – US dollars.

So tomorrow I will start making a plan (something else for which Zimbabweans are notorious) and see if I can assemble the 1½ hedge trimmers in the picture into one functioning one. After all adversity is the mother of invention and we’ve been here before. Once as Rhodesia and again in the years when the Zimbabwe dollar was real if completely useless.  It’s a sense of déjà-vu and I don’t like it one bit.

There is one positive aspect to this. In the carnage of the demise of the Zimbabwe dollar in 2008/9 when inflation was running in six figures per month, people who’d taken out housing mortgages paid them off with one note or less. Yes, that happens when the largest note is 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.  Now if the government floods the country with bond notes we should be able to pick them up cheaply enough by paying in real dollars to pay off our mortgage really cheaply. There will of course be collateral damage as they say – territory we visited back in 2008/9. I don’t think I want to go there at any price.

P.S. (a day later). I was called this morning by a company that sells irrigation equipment – a part that I’d ordered had arrived. On asking the cost I was told $78 “… but we are offering a discount of 25% for US$ cash or 10% for bond notes.” So apparently the bond notes, based on nothing, are actually in demand.

 


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The cost of doing business

13 04 2017

A whorl of cosmos

The rains are over for this season and the cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) is fading, still attractive but not as flamboyant as 3 weeks ago. We had good rains for once; 1020mm at the nursery which is probably not a record but certainly substantial. The cosmos was just as showy as ever – it doesn’t seem to mind if it’s a drought year or not.

The government press has predictably predicted a “bumper” harvest but that is far from certain as it will be at least another month or more before the crops are in and there is a lot more to farming than a good rainy season. The fall army worm also made an appearance this year. New to Zimbabwe it has a voracious appetite for maize and is difficult to control once the crop gets large so the small scale farmers are likely to have had a hard time.

The current financial crisis continues to deepen. US dollars (cash) are commanding a premium discount with some outlets offering up to 20% off for the greenbacks. Even the much maligned bond notes are becoming scarce but I have yet to get a discount for using them instead of a debit card.

Two weeks ago I finally received a large outstanding payment for a contract of gum trees that we did last year. Normally I would spend it on raw material – the coir pith we favour for propagating seedlings comes from India and is bizarrely about 60% of the cost of the local milled pine bark medium. It’s also reliable quality and we have yet to experience any significant problems with it. Not something we can say for the local product.

I got hold of the business manager at one of the banks I deal with and asked him what the chances were of getting money out to pay for a container of coir pith; all of US$9600 for 24 tonnes delivered to Beira docks in Mozambique. He was direct (I appreciate directness).

“Do you export?” he asked.

“No’

“Have you been depositing US dollars cash into your account?”

Was this a serious question? “No I haven’t”. I was tempted to add “you weren’t expecting me to say yes were you?” but I remained quiet.

“Then no. If you bring us the cash we will make the application to the Reserve Bank”.

Hmm, like anyone trusts them. He went onto assure me that if the request was refused I would get my cash back in US dollars, not bond notes, and that they’d never had an application for a request of this nature turned down.

I should point out that I have never had, to my knowledge, anything but US dollars deposited into my account and here I was being told that in fact the bank did not believe that. It says at the top of my statement that it is a US dollar account – but it’s only useful in Zimbabwe.

When the Reserve Bank announced last year that it was introducing the now notorious bond notes, with a value equivalent to the US dollar, in order to alleviate the cash shortage (true, a lot of cash had disappeared from circulation) the populace panicked. Rumours that it was an attempt to re-introduce the defunct Zimbabwe dollar flourished in the fertile rumour environment and a run on the banks began. People slept on the pavements for cash withdrawals that progressively dwindled to a paltry $30 or less. Yesterday at another of the banks that I use there were people sleeping on the pavement but now it’s for bond notes. Yes, there has been a massive switch to electronic money but some things still require cash. Schools in rural areas, which are cheaper, don’t have bank accounts and unscrupulous landlords demand cash.

The amount of bond notes issued is pitifully small, some $10m to start with and then another 30m or so. That they have been issued entirely in $2 and $5 denominations is telling – it was never intended to do much. $10 and $20 would have had far more impact. Initially the Reserve Bank stated that the bond notes were guaranteed by a loan of $200m from the Afrexim bank in Egypt, but this has been nearly impossible to ascertain. $200 million in a GDP of some $11 bn is not going to do much (see this Forbes article)  and anyway, if all that was needed was cash why not just buy it from the USA? We all know the Zimbabwe government is broke so it cannot buy cash. However what could be easier than adding a few zeros to electronic money? Electronic money is not based on anything which is why the bank manager I was talking to wanted to know if I could pay in US cash for the import of raw material. He wanted to know that if his bank were to deplete its precious nostro account (held outside the country) was being backed by real crispies (well, once upon a time they were crisp – long ago) and not some figment of a government official’s imagination. So where does that leave me?

Last Thursday there was a workshop at the Tobacco Research Board (TRB) near the airport. They were promoting the growing of vegetable seedlings. Not much to do with tobacco research to be sure but the seedlings of both crops can be grown in polystyrene trays floating on shallow ponds in which fertilizer has been dissolved. The TRB manufactures the trays, has a local company make up the fertilizer solution and is in a joint venture to manufacture the pine bark based medium in which the seedlings are grown. So they are looking to expand their market. I was concerned that I was going to have a lot of competition for my business. It was time to check out the potential competition and I was also curious to see what the TRB, once a world-renowned research organization, had been doing on vegetable seedling research.

I was not over-awed but I had to admit that their seedling tray quality had improved since I last bought any. The presentations were not very impressive and their idea of seedling quality was lacking some fundamental concepts. Their growing medium appeared to be reasonable quality but was expensive but they were willing to take any sort of money, cash or electronic. I will have to try some.

Logic dictates that if the medium is acceptable that I buy it in bulk with currency that I can only use within the country i.e. my locally held accounts even though it’s relatively expensive. If however the quality is poor then I will have to look at sourcing “real” dollars (anything is possible in Zimbabwe) and getting in the coir pith medium from India that I trust. Quite what I’ll spend my local money on then I really don’t know.

Next Tuesday, 18th April, is our independence day. Two weeks ago, as is customary, I received a letter of request from the local ZANU-PF (ruling party) office asking for donations in “cash or kind” for the celebrations they were going to host where “800” people were expected. It was shoved into the top left drawer of my desk – they would have to ask in person. In the past I have fought with them over this with arguments such as; “Why don’t you go into the shopping centres and ask for donations there?” but they know the white farmers feel vulnerable and are soft targets, so yes I inevitable buckle and donate.

I was driving back from the gym yesterday after lunch when the inevitable call came – they were at my business and what was I going to donate? It certainly was NOT going to be cash so they accepted $100 through mobile banking. I cursed myself for being weak then just consoled myself with the thought that they’d got the least value money option available. It was a cost of staying in business in Zimbabwe.


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Loadsa funny money

1 02 2017
Funny money and the real stuff

Funny money and the real stuff

 

Ok,  I wasn’t quite truthful, there’s not LOTS of funny money – there’s just more than we’ve had in the past.

Once upon a time there was just Zimbabwe dollars and we got by. Then they crashed, and people were sad, so we got US dollars because that’s how economics works and everyone was happy again. Now there are not so many US dollars (as notes but there’s plenty in accounts which we can’t use to import anything) because lots, really lots, have been stolen.

So when things started to change again the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank in its unfathomable wisdom saw fit to introduce Bond Notes and everyone panicked and withdrew their cash and mobile (phone) cash became king, dominated by one Ecocash who saw fit to charge extortionate fees so banks saw fit to introduce their version of mobile cash. These are debit cards that can be managed on phones and we got a swipe card machine and people were happy again (but only sort of).

Not many bond notes came across my desk and I was happy too (again only sort of). I did get lots of text messages on my cellphone confirming that people had used their cards to pay direct to my bank so I don’t check messages that much and miss the important ones. Now the funny money (top of the pile in the photo) is coming across my desk in much larger quantities as people try to get rid of it, pass the hot potato if you like. The government has decided to tax potatoes, before they can even get hot, and other basic foodstuffs too so everyone is unhappy again. But nobody is going to do anything about it.

Banks have said that if we deposit cash (the real thing in the photo – not the funny money) then we can import stuff to keep going but I haven’t found out if my cash, assuming I have it, is going to be flown to India to buy more raw materials or it’s just a ruse by the Reserve Bank, that in it’s wisdom (again), wants to mop up all the real money for the government to spend on paying employees or, more likely, on itself (which some people might be suspicious of).

It’s not looking good. Not at all.


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A Brexit. If only…

12 11 2016

Saturday midday we like to gather at the Gallery Delta in town. It’s Robert Paul’s old house, one of the oldest still standing in Harare and thus is listed. It also has good contemporary art but we like to sit and discuss politics, finance and generally anything of interest. Interesting people come through – it can attract diplomats and others but today it was the turn of local financial wiz Melissa. Married to a local Zimbabwean she has consulted to all manner of financial institutions both local and international and always has something of interest to contribute. The conversation inevitably turned towards Zimbabwe’s impending financial implosion and, of course, bond notes.

Background
In October 2008 the Zimbabwe dollar became worthless. Having been revalued three times and had 18 zeros removed over the period of 18 months (not of course in linear fashion) it really was worth less than toilet paper and also less effective. In the previous month my company went broke despite being  busy and after much soul-searching I brought in US$2000 of my own money which covered my expenses for the following month when customers started to ask if they could pay in US dollars.  The Zimbabwe dollar was officially abandoned at the beginning of February 2009 and the US dollar became the de facto currency in this part of the country. In the southern regions the South African rand and Botswana pula became more accepted due to the proximity of these countries. Change was initially an issue and supermarkets gave out sweets and ballpoint pens in lieu but come 2013 -2014 the South African rand was valued at close to 10 to the US dollar (2013 – 2014) so it made for useful change. We also had our first brush with bond coins (valued in USc but not exchangeable outside the country). Initially ridiculed they gained acceptance once the rand drifted above 11 to the US dollar. Currently there are a number of currencies that are officially trade-able; UK pound, US dollar, Australian dollar, euro, yen, Chinese yuan, Botswana pula and of course the rand.

As Melissa explained adapting the US dollar was a mistake. Zimbabwe became a magnet for criminals and money launderers the world over as there was little control over the use of hard cash – if you had it in the bank you could withdraw it as cash. Millions of dollars in cash were taken out through our extremely porous borders. The start of the rot was nearly instantaneous.

The rest of us were too enamoured with the new freedom to do just about anything we liked with our money to notice. You could travel unfettered by the need for endless currency applications; real VISA cards worked anywhere! South African supermarkets moved into the country and bought out the local chains and imported goods flooded the shelves at vastly inflated prices. But hey, we had choice.

The economy expanded due largely to the mining sector and high prices of gold and other minerals. Agriculture, once the mainstay of the economy, continued to flounder on the back of the land redistribution exercise though there were a few years when tobacco enjoyed a resurgence, driven by buoyant prices. Attempts to get external investors interested were hamstrung by the contradictory message; invest with us but the majority of the shares must be held by a Zimbabwean.

Corruption and nepotism have gone from strength to strength. Perhaps a new word should be coined here – nepotist + kleptocrat = neptokrat. Readers are welcome to make suggestions. It seems that every day there are new revelations of squandered, stolen and diverted funds. The most famous is the fifteen billion dollars that was unaccounted for from the Chiadzwa diamond fields in the east of the country, alluded to by none other than President Mugabe himself. Now $15bn is a lot of money for a small country like Zimbabwe, a bit more than the GDP in 2014, which could have wiped out our external debts and left a sizeable chunk to get things going again but nothing appears to have happened to those responsible.

As the economy founders so the tax base shrinks and there is little wonder that lower ranking civil servants have not been paid for months (civil service salaries gobble 97% of the cash budget). The military of course do get paid – the police have been told to raise their own wages and do so by the myriad road blocks and spot fines throughout the country that have left them thoroughly discredited and despised.

It’s all about trust
In May this year the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) governor announced the introduction of the bond notes and the run on the banks began. The proposal was to ensure the value of the bond notes at an equivalent to the US dollar but they would be for internal use only so no good to those who would seek to externalize them. The public saw it as a ruse to bring back the Zimbabwe dollar in another guise. The restrictions on withdrawing cash soon followed and served to fuel the panic. It didn’t help that the bond from the Afreximbank that serves to support the value of the bond notes is veiled in secrecy and ignorance. Unexplained delays in releasing the notes and the refusal of a German company to print them haven’t helped.  Some banks are allowing more cash to be withdrawn than others but reports abound of clients queuing overnight to withdraw as little as $20 a day.

Zimbabwe has been slow to adapt to the plastic money found elsewhere. ATM and debit cards have been around for years and mobile banking has seen a major increase with the rise of smart phones which are ubiquitous even among the poor. The RBZ has been pushing the plastic money hard and most outlets now have POS (swipe card machines as they are known locally) machines and accept mobile banking. While unemployment is difficult to quantify (there haven’t been any recent surveys) it is undoubtedly high and a substantial proportion are informal traders who have to pay for the goods they bring across the South African border in hard cash. No small wonder they are suspicious of bond notes and local plastic money.

Cash is now commanding a premium of some 15% and I’m told traders abound at the local Roadport (bus terminus) in town and they have lots of $100 notes that cannot be found in banks. Likely they are in the employ of the neptokrats. I can now only buy the low sulphur diesel for my pickup with cash and some filling stations restrict the amount of fuel that can be bought with a card. Most businesses will give a discount for cash.

Legal challenges to the introduction of the bond notes have followed but on the 1st November Robert Mugabe signed the notes into law. Fait accompli.

Imports and nostro accounts
Nostro accounts (the money banks use to pay for imports) are heavily depleted due to our massive trade deficit. A friend who imports agrochemicals cannot pay his external suppliers despite having the money in the bank. VISA cards, which also depend on nostro accounts, work anywhere in the world for the moment and the crippling power shedding of last year and earlier this year have not reappeared largely due to the pay-as-you-go metering installed by the national power provider but I for one don’t expect this to continue. Greenhouse plastic, considered an essential import, is no longer available and this week when buying some basic pharmaceuticals I was informed that the calcium tablets had to be paid for in cash!

Smoke and mirrors
The people behind the bond note issue are not stupid – they must have known what the reaction would be. Why did they do it? I think it’s all a red herring to force us into the digital money arena where zeros are easily added with a few computer key strokes. After all, only $75m bond notes will initially be introduced in the form of $5 and $2 denominations. This is very small money though few actually believe that the neptokrats will be able to resist printing more, which may or may not be backed by a bond. The bulk of the cash in circulation is in US$100 and US$50 notes so the bond notes will have minimal effect on the nation’s liquidity. The various protest movements that sprung up this year, over various other social issues, including #thisFlag and #tajamuka were instrumental in sparking the riots that rocked Harare and Bulawayo, the second city, in July and August this year but it’s been quiet over the last 2 months as people’s attention is diverted into getting their cash out of the banks. Was this intentional or just fortuitous from the authorities’ point of view?

It's not looking good (Chatham House report)

It’s not looking good (Chatham House report)

We may yet be bailed out by the IMF Melissa suggested. Mozambique is also in dire financial straights as are Angola and Malawi. Zimbabwe imploding might well drag down the whole sub-region –  propping up the current regime would be preferable. Zimbabwe has cleared its debt with the IMF so this is possible.

And last but not least
As with any crisis of this proportion there are those who will find the humorous angle. “With the tumble of the English pound, the waver of the US dollar, the volatility of the rand at least the bond notes are stable” is a popular social network joke. When Harare’s main rubbish tip mysteriously caught alight a week ago, and dumped noxious fumes over the northern suburbs, there were those who postulated it was being fueled by bond notes!

20161107_082741

Pomona rubbish tip burning – bond notes the fuel?

Ah the Brexit, if only our problems were so small.

 

 


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A country on the brink of disaster

1 11 2016

We in Zimbabwe are apparently teetering on the brink of disaster. The much-dreaded bond notes alluded to in the previous post have been signed into law by President Mugabe (yup, Bob notes are real guys!) and it’s all down hill from here. We are still not sure where they are coming from as the German company behind the printing of the now defunct Zimbabwe dollar refused to print these. Never fear, someone will step up to the plate where there’s money to be made.

Marondera air day. Fun in the name of fund raising

Marondera air day. Fun in the name of fund raising

Going out to an air day organised for charity at Marondera, a small agricultural town 3/4 hour from Harare, on Saturday there was little sign of impending disaster. Vehicles clogged the road and drivers drove badly. There were no queues at filling stations but I’d had to search out low sulphur diesel the previous day as my regular supplier didn’t seem to have it anymore. When we arrived at Marondera aerodrome there was a fair collection of aircraft  both ancient (see the Cessna 182 in the foreground) and brand new – a 2 seat helicopter. I guess it was all small fry compared with a similar event in the civilized world but hey, it was actually happening! The Air Force had even been roped in (camouflage aircraft back left) to supply parachutists for entertainment and paid rides for the public. The parachutists certainly were entertaining with some spectacularly hard landings and bad approaches through trees to the LZ. And yes, I mean THROUGH trees! The inevitable party after the show was over was not well attended and the music was not great either but hey, we could still buy imported beer.

The man in charged of the local parachute school said he was still very busy though it seemed that paramotoring, which is why we were there, is not so attractive as we didn’t have any inquiries. The next day the wind was too strong for us to fly so we packed up, had a late breakfast with our host the other side of town and headed home along a busy road.

Today I am breaking news to my employees that they will no longer be paid in cash and like the rest of us will have to get themselves a debit card. It’s not going to be a popular move but they were warned 2 months ago that this was coming. Cash can now be bought for as much as a 15% premium which can make for a useful bargaining tool when buying. My partner and I have decided to embrace the crisis and have bought a house in a suburb that needs considerable refurbishing before we move in. Surprisingly not all the companies we’ve got quotes from are that interested in cash and only offer a 5% discount but with the bond notes now inevitable that might change. Who knows, we might be able to pay off the mortgage with a few bond notes and actually save a lot of money as they rapidly become worthless. (People who had mortgages in the Zim dollar days were often able to pay them off for a few notes as they became completely worthless.)


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“Bob” notes

14 10 2016
Any currency will do (almost)

Any currency will do (almost)

Here in Zimbabwe we have no currency of our own. It was finally discarded in February 2009 along with all 12 zeros that were commonly attached. Notes are now collected by curious collectors. The US dollar is the currency of choice but even that is running out, hoarded away from banks by a public terrified of the introduction of Bob notes. Oops, I meant BOND notes.

Bond notes you ask? Yup, notes with a US dollar value printed on them but no actual value outside Zimbabwe. An awful lot of people think that they will not have any value inside Zimbabwe too so are hoarding the real currency away from the banks.

So whose bright idea was this? Well, maybe I should explain what a Bob note, sorry it just seems to slip out, I mean BOND note, actually is. Earlier this year, as it became apparent that the government was running out of cash to pay its employees (some 80% of the budget goes on paying wages – the rest is siphoned by other means but maybe the figures are the wrong way around), the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) came up with this workaround. They would get a bond of $200 million from a reputable external bank and print notes amounting to the same value for use solely in Zimbabwe. They were at pains to point out the last condition. After all, we already had bond coins which had been initially rejected by the public but had become accepted as a means of supplying change once the South African rand had ceased to have a convenient exchange rate of 10:1 to the US dollar. So why not have bond NOTES? Surely the public would understand and anyway, with parity to the dollar and no mention of bond notes being deposited into one’s account the cash crisis would be solved?

Right. Like there is any trust at all for anything this government suggests. Panic ensued. There was a run on the banks which was exacerbated by the restrictions that were imposed on drawing cash and promises from sources that it was NOT a reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar just made things worse. Riots ensued and now diesel is short. Point-of-sale (card swipe) machine supplies ran dry and banks couldn’t install what stocks they had fast enough. Predictions of food shortages proved false (well not in the supermarkets) and cash money now commands a premium of up to 15% over transfers and card swipes.

So we’ll accept just about any currency. The bond notes were due to be introduced this month but have now been deferred to next month. Maybe it will be added to the list on the bottom of the till slip but I’m willing to be there will be a few zeros too. Oh, I paid in cash. US dollars.

The term Bob note is a reference to the name of the Zimbabwean president – Robert Mugabe. It’s not my creation but has appeared on the social media recently.

 


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Restoration and order

16 07 2016
Appropriate slogan

Appropriate slogan

This slogan on the back of a school  bus that I spotted in the industrial sites on Tuesday was strangely appropriate for this last week.

On Monday, Pastor Evan Mawarire, the face behind #Thisflag, released a video clip announcing that the police were requesting to interview him the following day and that the proposed stay-away for Wednesday and Thursday may or may not succeed. He was duly arrested the following day and charged with inciting public violence and disturbing the peace. Alex Magaisa, a Zimbabwean expert on constitutional law who is based in the UK, found it an odd charge given that Pastor Evan (as he is known) has consistently called for peaceful shows of displeasure.

I had to take a trip to the other side of the airport on Tuesday – a route that is normally fraught with police roadblocks. There was only one by the Groombridge shopping centre on College Road. It’s a favorite due to the nature of the stop street and the left turn where motorists are tempted to creep forward over the delimiting line in order to see oncoming traffic. So where were the others? Preparing for the next day’s stay-away?

Meanwhile Grace Mugabe, the president’s wife, took off for Singapore for a bit of shopping in a safer environment. She may also have been celebrating an award given her earlier by the ZNCC (Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce); the “Outstanding Value Investment Addition Award in recognition of the massive work she has done at (her) Gushungu Dairy and her children’s home in Mazowe”. Given that the aforementioned dairy is a massive cash sink, Dr Mugabe as she is referred to in The Herald article, must have been celebrating this extraordinary display of lèche derrière/brown-nosing. Or maybe she was feeling uneasy in the increasingly vitriolic atmosphere of the social media which was actually working sans VPN this time around. Yes, she apparently did get a PhD, in 3 months, at the local University of Zimbabwe. Her thesis is apparently no longer in the library.

Wednesday’s stay away dawned peacefully and not as well observed as last week.  Pastor Evan’s trial was scheduled for the afternoon and a massive crowd congregated peacefully at the court in Rotten Row together with a large number of lawyers who volunteered their services. The police had changed the charges to something more akin to sedition. Their error as the magistrate threw the case out as it was successfully argued that Pastor Evan could not have had a fair trial under these conditions. The crowd celebrated  peacefully and a new hero was born. Social media speculated that the post of Prosecutor General would soon be vacant and someone suggested Alex Magaisa who said it wasn’t his forté; he “would get bored dealing with criminals”. The Zimbabwe situation finally makes the South African news headlines. Only on Thursday do we get on BBC.

The police searched Pastor Evan’s house looking for a police “button” (they meant baton) and helmet. Ridicule followed and a picture was posted of someone looking for the missing “button” at the back of a sofa. A sharp-eyed and clear-memoried person noted that this was not even an original idea as Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition MDC party had had exactly the same charge leveled at him some 10 years ago (a photo of the actual charge was produced). Nothing suspicious was found at Pastor Evan’s house.

On Thursday evening I received an email from an acquaintance saying that the Ministry of Defense had grounded all UAVs (drones in most people’s lexicon). No reason was given and the Civil Aviation Authority couldn’t clarify this. Was someone panicking and why? I have 3 multicopters of which 2 can be considered toys. The third is looking for work to pay for itself! I guess it may have to wait a while.

A drone's eye view of the farm where I live

A drone’s eye view of the farm where I live

Friday and I’m looking for wages for a week’s time. I have worked out that if my application to one bank to withdraw cash en masse fails I’ll have to go the multi-account withdrawal route. In all I have 3 accounts; 1 personal and 2 corporate. By moving money around I can withdraw $800 per day – $300 each from the corporate accounts and $200 from my personal. I put the application in anyway and the clerk drops a broad hint that those accounts that receive cash receive more favorable consideration to withdraw it. I point out that putting money in merely to withdraw it later is pointless, expensive and anyway, can I trust the bank to give it back? My cash takings have plummeted by 70% in June over May.  I withdraw the $300 anyway and the teller laughs when I point out, loudly, that his drawer is full of cash. It’s not as much as it looks he says. When I ask if he has plenty of South African rand he says no, that’s also restricted to $300 equivalent per day.

Although Pastor Evan claims no political affiliation his demands to government have broad appeal.

  1. Pay civil servants on time
  2. Reduce roadblocks and stop officers harassing people for cash
  3. President Robert Mugabe should fire and prosecute corrupt officials
  4. Plans to introduce bond notes to ease a cash shortage should be abandoned
  5. Remove a recent ban on imported goods.

It’s notable that the Reserve Bank already seems to be back-tracking on the bond notes. They were supposed to be releasing $200m of them in October. Now that’s been pushed back to December. Today’s press notes that the Government is still behind on last month’s wages. President Mugabe is joining his wife in Singapore and the cops were out in force yesterday. The ban on importing basic goods looks like a bad idea and probably unenforceable. And government corruption? Yes.

According to the newspapers...

According to the newspapers…


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