HARARE, March 21 (Reuters) – Zimbabwe plans to float a $100
million bond to rebuild its dilapidated infrastructure as the
country struggles to attract foreign investment, the finance
minister said on Wednesday.
Zimbabwe’s infrastructure, such as its roads, railways, dams
and power plants, has been starved of finance due to a decade of
economic collapse, which eased somewhat with the formation of a
power-sharing government in 2009.
“Very soon we are going to issue a $100 million
infrastructure bond through our financial institutions,” Finance
Minister Tendai Biti told an investor conference in Harare.
He give no further details.
Zimbabwe has been using the U.S. dollar since 2009 when the
country abandoned the Zimbabwean dollar after inflation reached
500 billion percent.
A coalition government formed between political rivals
President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has
managed to stabilise the economy but the country faces a cash
crunch as investors stay on the sidelines.
Biti, who is a member of Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement
for Democratic Change (MDC), said last week the government faced
a shutdown because projected revenue from the diamond industry
had failed to come through.
Investors have been unnerved by the government’s drive to
force foreign-owned mining companies to surrender majority
stakes to blacks under an economic empowerment programme.
At the conference, Biti sought to allay investor fears,
saying the government did not plan to expropriate shares and he
urged companies to look at Zimbabwe as long-term investment
destination.
(Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Editing by Olivia Kumwenda
and Toby Chopra)
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