Zimbabwe’s new government took its first step towards rebuilding the shattered nation on Wednesday, honouring a pledge to civil servants by paying them in United States dollars to counter the impact of hyperinflation.
“We will pay every civil servant in foreign currency,” Finance Minister Tendai Biti told a news conference in Harare.
The armed forces had been paid on Tuesday, he said.
He did not say how Zimbabwe, which is grappling with the effects of the world’s highest rate of inflation, will source the forex.
Biti, the number two of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) — which joined a national unity government last week — said the move was an attempt to pay the country’s 130 000 civil servants a decent wage.
Since last year, civil servants such as teachers, nurses and doctors have downed tools demanding that they paid in hard currency.
“We have to get Zimbabwe working again; getting teachers to school is part of efforts to get Zimbabwe to work again, having examination papers being marked is part of having Zimbabwe work again,” Biti said.
Soldiers were paid a $100 allowance — worth more than current salaries — this week and payments to workers in other public sectors in the crisis-hit country will follow.
“Today it’s the teachers and the rest tomorrow,” Biti said, with the new government having to “juggle” resources to make the payments.
Zimbabwe’s political and economic crises have reduced the local currency, once on a par with the British pound, to almost nothing, forcing Zimbabweans to pay trillions of local dollars just for a loaf of bread.
Last week Wednesday, shortly after his inauguration as prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai announced that civil servants would be paid in foreign currency and appealed for them to return to work.
Tsvangirai explained that the foreign currency payment will enable people to go to work, to feed their families and to survive.
Figures from the World Food Programme last month indicated that more than half of Zimbabwe’s 12-million people did not have enough to eat.
Consecutive years of drought and a land-reform programme launched in 2000, in which some mostly 4 000 white-owned commercial farms were seized and redistributed to black Zimbabweans, have added to the country’s difficulties.
The scheme has drastically reduced agricultural production, which once accounted for 40% of the economy, as most of the new beneficiaries lack both farming equipment and expertise.
A decade ago, Zimbabwe produced enough maize to feed the nation and export a surplus.
Members of the new Cabinet assumed office on Monday and held their first meeting the following day on how to haul the country out of economic meltdown, characterised by world’s highest inflation, last put in July at 231-million percent.
Analysts say inflation in Zimbabwe actually stands at several billion percent.
The national currency has been repeatedly devalued and restrictions on the use of foreign currencies, including the US dollar, the euro and the rand have been lifted by Harare.
Zimbabwe is also struggling to fend off a deepening humanitarian crisis amid a cholera epidemic that has killed 3 688 people and infected 77 650 since August, according to the UN’s World Health Organisation.
Biti’s announcement came as a magistrate court in eastern town of Mutare ordered ministerial nominee Roy Bennett (52) to be kept in custody until March 4, on the grounds there was “reasonable suspicion” against him in a terrorism case.
The coffee-farmer-turned politician, who was arrested on Friday, is accused of illegal possession of arms for the purposes of committing banditry, insurgency and terrorism, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. — AFP