Zimbabwe Engaging IMF, World Bank On How To Clear Its Debts
Finance and Economic Development Minister, Professor Mthuli Ncube has said Zimbabwe is engaging with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) on how to clear its debts with international financial institutions.
Ncube told an IMF press conference on Saturday that Zimbabwe had begun issuing bonds with maturities of between two and 20 years in order to honour its debt to creditors and was looking at how they can be traded, while it was also looking to issue bonds to compensate white former farmers over time.
A bond is a fixed-income investment that represents a loan made by an investor to a borrower, usually corporate or governmental, according to Investopedia.
Zimbabwe has over $10 billion in external debt, mostly in arrears. It has not received funding from lenders like the IMF and World Bank for more than two decades as a result. Ncube said:
We’ve begun to make token payments to the World Bank, the AfDB (African Development Bank), European Investment Bank. And all the Paris Club creditors, 17 of them, we will be making token payments to show that we want to be a good debtor.
He said IMF staff would visit Zimbabwe in December and then discuss a staff-monitored programme in the first and second quarters of 2023.
In 2019, the IMF approved Zimbabwe’s Staff Monitored Program which was intended to assist the authorities in the implementation of a coherent set of economic and social policies to facilitate a return to macroeconomic stability.
The SMP was also meant to assist in re-engagement with the international community.
