Harare | Wednesday
ZIMBABWE’S main opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), vowed on Tuesday to revive the collapsing economy if voted into the presidency next year, and unveiled a 1 000-page scheme on how it would run the economy through 2004.
The economic scheme was the most specific proposal yet of how the two-year-old MDC would run the country if its leader Morgan Tsvangirai were to win the presidential election, expected in April.
Tsvangirai told a news conference that the first step in reviving the economy would be to rein in the violence that has engulfed Zimbabwe’s countryside during the last 18 months.
“The country’s economy is in a total mess. The state-sponsored violence, lawlessness and intimidation is what has led this country to where it is today,” Tsvangirai said.
MDC’s shadow finance minister, Eddie Cross, said restoring commercial agriculture was essential to bringing the economy back on track, in a nation where 50% of the economy is based on agriculture.
With the national debt expected to exceed $10-billion by April 2002, Cross said a MDC government would turn to the Paris Club of donors to restructure the foreign debt.
But Cross said it would take three years to bring inflation down to a manageable level. Now at about 70%, he said the inflation rate could reach 100% by the year’s end.
The scheme also calls for stabilizing the exchange rate, officially pegged at 55 Zimbabwean dollars to one US dollar, but soaring to about 300 to the greenback on the thriving parallel market.
The plan would boost social spending to rebuild the health and educational systems and to combat the spread of diseases, notably Aids.
But the MDC said it would also reduce spending by restructuring debt payments and by pulling out of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Zimbabwe is suffering its worst-ever economic crisis, fuelled by the political instability stemming from President Robert Mugabe’s violence-wracked land reforms. – AFP
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