Bulawayo (New Ziana)-Price hikes currently being experienced in the country are not justified but are a result of greedy tendencies by shop owners, Finance and Economic Development Minister Mthuli Ncube said at the weekend.
He was speaking after a tour of shops in the Bulawayo Central Business District (CBD) where he came face to face with reality after discovering that some shops were now pegging their prices exclusively in United States Dollars (USD).
Those shops which were accepting the local currency were charging unrealistic prices.
Ncube said the government will not tolerate the behaviour being exhibited by retailers and businesspeople and threatened to withdraw all the incentives that it introduced to support business.
“As government, we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour where shops are refusing the domestic currency and accepting US dollars only,” he said.
“We cannot accept that as government. Both currencies have to be accepted. There is wanton increase of prices for no reason. Nothing has changed between last week and this week. We saw maize meal prices doubling, totally unacceptable and unjustified,” he said.
He said to protect the citizens against unjustified price hikes, the government recently allowed free importation of 14 basic commodities including cooking oil, flour, mealie meal, toothpaste and petroleum jelly.
“We ended up as government allowing citizens to import anything in terms of the basic commodities. Then the big shops complain that we were informalizing the economy, yet it is them who are pushing up the prices,” said Ncube.
Ncube said the government would not hesitate to withdraw licences for errant businesses.
“We have also just discovered that the middlemen between producers and retailers, these so-called aggregators are also part of the problem. I have a list of their names and we are going to fine them heavily.
“Any shop that behaves so badly will have their licences withdrawn. We don’t want them to blame the government,” he said.
Ncube also blamed the business community for working in cahoots with money changers in the streets to weaken the local currency through illegal forex trading activities.
“We also went to the “World Bank” were they sell currency here in Bulawayo where I told them that their activities were illegal. I asked them where they were getting their money from. I saw them with brand new notes which is totally unacceptable. We would like to send a strong message as government that we are not happy with these price increases and these movements that we are seeing in the parallel market and we are taking action on it,” warned Ncube, adding that they will soon take additional measures to stop the rot.
He added, “It becomes heavy handedness when government starts to criminalise some of these matters. At the moment we are still using civil law in dealing with this situation, but we have to go an extra step if fines are not deterrent enough.”
“Recently, we removed the 15 percent surrender in terms of domestic transactions on hard currency, surely that’s a benefit to local business. We should see some kind of reciprocity but not in form of hike in prices. It is totally unacceptable,” said Ncube.
He said government had also lowered interests rate from 200 percent to 140 percent to support business but will consider hiking again if the errand behaviour by business persists.
The government will not sit on its laurels but will be taking stern measures in the coming weeks to strengthen the domestic currency by reducing negative impacts eroding its value.
New Ziana
