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Gono admits Zim is broke
28/02/2007 22:27 - (SA)
Harare - The head of the Zimbabwe state central bank acknowledged his nation is broke and said food imports were gobbling up foreign currency desperately needed for fuel and spare parts, said reports on Wednesday.
Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono told a panel of officials that many black farmers, including politicians, who resettled on former white-owned farms, were failing to produce food. Zimbabwe was once the region's breadbasket.
"There are some people who have become professional land occupiers, vandalising equipment and moving from one farm to another," Gono told a parliamentary committee on home affairs, according to the daily Herald, a government mouthpiece.
Under President Robert Mugabe's land reform programme, at least 5 000 white-owned farms have been seized with virtually no compensation since 2000. Many are derelict.
Mugabe was on state visit to longtime ally Namibia, where hundreds of people took to the streets with signs that read "Go Mugabe Go" and "Go Home Dictator."
"President Mugabe is a dictator who is guilty of several human rights abuses and to a certain extent war crimes," said Phil Ya Nangoloh, the executive director of the National Society for Human Rights. "He is an international pariah. He is not welcome in Namibia."
Mugabe also faces growing unrest and strikes at home. Last week police slapped a three-month ban on demonstrations.
Gono said he received desperate calls daily from government enterprises -food distributors, the state gasoline procurement agency, the loss-making national airline, the state railroad company and main power utility - demanding hard currency for imported materials, the Herald reported.
Desperate calls
He said official from the power utility call at dusk saying: "If you don't give us money the nation will be in darkness."
Gono said the central bank's priority was to allocate hard currency for imports of corn, the staple, to avert a looming food crisis, especially in southern Zimbabwe. Currency was diverted from almost every government department to buy food, he conceded.
The committee chairperson, ruling party lawmaker Claudius Makova, said its investigations showed the Zimbabwe police needed more than 15 000 vehicles but possessed just 3 000, of which half were off the road awaiting repairs and imported spare parts.
Makova said the nation's passport office ran out of imported materials to produce passports and identity cards and resorted to issuing emergency travel documents on sheets of paper.
It faced a 300 000 backlog in passport applications and renewals.
The air force did not receive the $2m it needed to keep its planes airborne.
Tobacco exports, tourism and mining were the nation's main hard currency earners before the land seizures. Tobacco production this year is forecast at one-fifth of the 1999 level and food output is at one-third.
Official inflation is nearly 1 600%, the highest in the world. Zimbabwe is facing acute shortages of food, petrol, medicine and other essential imports. Power and water outages occur almost daily.
In the past month alone, prices of many household supplies have doubled and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has forecast official inflation at 4 000% this year.
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