Magaisa is offside
CDE Editor, my patriotic take is that Dr Gono is explaining the circumstances that led to the writing off of the loans. The economic situation was not normal for both lenders and borrowers.
How many citizens lost their money that was in their bank accounts when the local currency collapsed? We all wrote off our bank balances. RBZ used forex to buy machinery and gave loans to farmers who were expected to pay in local currency which collapsed.
The figures being thrown around for the loans are in US dollars being the cost of machinery. With the collapse of currency and business viability, including farming business, it was not only farming debts that were written off. Pensions were also lost in the same way RBZ or Government lost what it had lent to farmers.
In my view, hyperinflation looted from us all. We can then debate the causality equation of hyperinflation endlessly. Farmers whose loans were written off did not loot. Like us they too lost value one way or the other. It’s not only farming loans that were lost.
For the “grinding mill attendant” to simplistically dwell on RBZ/Government losses is just throwing a political kite hoping to create a negative picture of our Government. As brother Gono stated, colonially created loans were inherited by our new Government in 1980.
Loans for Boer farmers and satanic military operations against our armed struggle. Loans that were used to bomb Chimoio and Nyadzonya that also burdened Zimbabweans.
In fact, such colonial loans were much higher than our mechanisation debate loans. Yes, Magaisa, went offside and parochial in his naive reasoning hoping to launder the negative effects of sanctions that created pressure on our economy after the land reform programme.
Many black farmers who had tried to successfully export their produce to the West could not access, the hitherto, Boer markets because of sanctions.
While I cannot conclude without declaring my interest as an A1 farmer who did not benefit directly from the programme anyway, but the multiplier effect of the loans, I believe contributed positively to our economic activities as a country.
Without sanctions that contributed to our hyperinflation the loans would have been used better than what took place, given the circumstances, as Dr Gono tried to elucidate. Amen.
Cde Mzvinavhu.