Zimbabwe’s Central Bank Governor, Gideon Gono, was in Washington on Friday lobbying members of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) board not to recommend the expulsion of Zimbabwe, state radio reported.
The radio said Gono met eight members of the IMF board to make a case for Zimbabwe’s continued membership. Zimbabwe made partial payment last week of $120-million of its $295-million arrears.
The IMF was to discuss expelling Zimbabwe at an executive board meeting later on Friday. If the executive board recommends expulsion, a vote by the full board of governors could take place at its annual meeting later this month.
A resolution requiring a country to withdraw from the fund would need the support of governors representing 85% of voting power. This has only happened once in the IMF’s history: to Czechoslovakia in 1954. Cuba withdrew voluntarily.
Zimbabwe has sent conflicting signals about whether it considers it important to remain a member of the IMF.
Gono has said the IMF board meeting is crucial to Zimbabwe’s financial future. Minister of Finance Herbert Murerwa told Parliament last month that it is essential to maintain contacts ”with international cooperating partners”. But President Robert Mugabe has said: ”The IMF can go to hell.”
The $120-million payment, which took many by surprise, is a sign Zimbabwe is intent on remaining in the IMF.
Zimbabwe has appealed to its neighbour, South Africa, for help in meeting the rest of its IMF obligations.
Zimbabwe has also devalued its currency, relaxed the state monopoly on critical fuel and grain imports, and increased gas and diesel prices to more realistic levels.
The IMF suspended aid to Zimbabwe in 1999 following disputes over unbudgeted expenditures, the value of its currency and the cost of its participation in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Within a year, the World Bank and African Development Bank had done the same.
By 2001, Zimbabwe had stopped making payments on all foreign loans. Two years later, the IMF suspended the country’s voting rights and began the process that could lead to expulsion.
Independent economists in Zimbabwe have said continued IMF membership is unlikely to attract new lending nor new lines of credit.
”It will not put food on the table for the people,” said Tendai Biti, spokesperson for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
Critics believe Mugabe plans to make propaganda mileage either way. Expulsion would allow the government to continue to blame the West for Zimbabwe’s troubled economy, while continued membership would be lauded as a diplomatic coup against Britain and the United States, repeated portrayed by Mugabe as his enemies.
An editorial on Friday in the state-owned daily Herald said: ”Zimbabwe can survive with or without the IMF.”
But it said continued IMF membership ”will definitely lessen Zimbabwe’s heavy economic burden by opening up international lines of credit that had been closed”.
Zimbabwe’s once-prosperous economy has plummeted since 2000 when Mugabe’s government began seizing thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to blacks in an often-violent campaign.
The government blames targeted sanctions imposed by the European Union and US — which have frozen the bank accounts and placed travel restrictions on about 200 members of Mugabe’s political elite — for the country’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1980.
Inflation is running at 254% a year, and foreign currency, food and most other basic commodities are in critically short supply.
In a statement released on Friday, the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, a group representing churches, trades unions, rights lobbyists and opposition political parties, said: ”Contrary to the government’s wayward claims that Zimbabwe is being demonised and sabotaged, President Mugabe and his Cabinet are the chief saboteurs.”
Mugabe has promulgated laws such as the Public Order and Security Act, suppressing protest, and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, muzzling journalists, ”that have spelled misery for the people”, the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition said.
”The level of ineptitude in government … and the lack of remorsefulness means that fuel shortages, food shortages, joblessness, [and] corruption will continue unabated,” said the coalition.
During a three-month blitz earlier this year on the urban poor, said to be aimed at rooting out black marketeering, crime and squalor, 700 000 Zimbabweans lost homes and businesses. — Sapa-AP