HARARE — Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor, Gideon Gono is on the forex black market pouring huge amounts of quadrillion Zimbabwe dollars in order to desperately raise money to pay off accumulating debts with regional power suppliers that have threatened switching off Zimbabwe.

 

Zimdaily has established that Eskom of South Africa, reportedly owed in excess of US$20 million and Mozambique’s Cahora Bassa has also written to Harare sounding a warning over a yet to be established amount in debt owed by the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA).

 

 

Our investigations revealed that the power crunch has been the reason Gono recently sunk his claws into the forex black market to trigger a massive jump in major currencies’ trading rates over the past week.

 

The US$ for example, jumped from trading at Z$160 billion (Old Currency) on August 5 to a record high of US$1 selling for Z$1 trillion (Old Currency) on Thursday.

 

Zimdaily on Wednesday visited the popular Roadport forex market in Harare and established the existence of huge quantities of new notes of local currency supplied directly from the RBZ.

 

One lady forex dealer revealed to Zimdaily in confidence that the bunch of notes she had in the boot of her car amounted to Z$200 000 (new value), which is equivalent to about Z$2 quadrillion in the old value.

 

“I get a bag (huge amount of cash) from my people at the RBZ daily and have to make sure I finish all the cash in buying US dollars,” the lady said.

 

An official at the RBZ who had seen the recent communication from Eskom told Zimdaily Friday that the SA power utility-grappling with its own failures to satisfy the market at home-had indicated to ZESA that its failure to service its debt was severely affecting operations and causing a lot of tension between Eskom and SA’s government and business.

 

Efforts to obtain comment from Eskom failed. However, an official from ZESA’s public relations department who declined to reveal his name said in a telephone interview, “I cant respond to that issue unless its put down on paper”. Gono was repeatedly said to be unavailable by his personal assistant.

 

 

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