Coffee With The Zig
If you were having coffee with me I would welcome you to my tangle of words, have a cuppa to warm you up, its been raining but not pouring… though, if it hasn’t rained in a long time, then a few drops can seem like a flood… Similar to how a drop of water has more value to someone dying of thirst in the desert. Makes you appreciate how the local currency in Botswana a country with a semi-arid climate is called the Pula… Pula means rain.
On Friday the 5th of April the Reserve Bank Governor announced the new monetary policy in which he unveiled Zimbabwe’s all-new “structured currency” backed by the country’s gold reserve called the ZiG derived from ZimGold.
If you are having coffee with me, I would tell you that each day in this country feels like an April Fools joke, and when an announcement is made, you always expect them to say… “we are just kidding we wanted to see how you would react“…. Government orders and proclamations are always so ultimate and implemented; forthwith, henceforth, with immediate effect without factoring in “complications” in their execution.
I mean what country launches a whole new currency as if they are an upcoming indie musician launching their debut album. “Hey listen to my new album…”
Basically, the Reserve Bank Governor basically was like; “Hey check out our shiny new currency (its backed by gold) you all have 21 days to return the old currency notes in exchange for the new currency… whose notes we are still printing and will be available on 30 April…..”
Wait, how do you launch a new currency when you haven’t finished printing the notes or run a public campaign educating people on the new money, its security features, the conversion rates and how the transition will be handled?….
I have come to appreciate that public confidence plays a large part in success of a currency and so far the Zig, has been off to an inconvenient start…. Even their promo PR campaign to show that the country has sufficient gold reserves as the president toured the Reserve Bank didn’t display a convinvcing amount of gold (well maybe for security reasons they couldn’t show the whole pile but the end result was a dip in the confidence levels)
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the financial sector was a mess this past weekend as they implemented the currency conversion from the ZWL to the ZiG. The power utility company was the most affected as unlike other who ran a dualized system which uses both the United States Dollar and the local currency unit, the power utility’s billing system is core local currency which meant people could not pay for their prepaid electricity.. I’m probably one of many who spent the weekend in self-imposed loadshedding because we could not pay for electricity tokens and all the online payment platforms were down…
Informal traders (who are currently the backbone of the economy) have stopped accepting the local currency and the new one isnt available yet, so you can imagine the chaos, actually no, you cant imagine it you have to be out in the street trying to pay for something that costs less than USD $1 and everyone is refusing your wad of Zim dollar bills which was somehow worth $0.50 on the street and is now worth(less) a figure that’s not easy to calculate.
Apparently the maths is very simple…
1 ZiG is worth 1milligram of gold
1kg of gold is USD$73.73 so 1mg of gold is USD$ 0,07373 at time of conversion
Therefore US$1: ZiG13.5616
At last RBZ valuation US$1: ZWL $33 903,9916
To convert ZWL to ZiG, you simply divide the ZW$33 903,9916 by ZiG13,56 to get
ZiG 1 = ZWL$2 499.9263
Easy peasy right?… hang on, I think I am getting a headache… but hey the new currency might have a QR code on it… no idea what it would do if you scanned it… how cool would it be, if scanning the QR code handled all the necessary conversions or opened a the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s Exchange rate calculator?.. But in their explainer flyers they did not reference the QR code maybe its only on the specimen notes.
The new currency doesnt look like something that would inspire a belief in its value, as some people suggest maybe if they did away with the balancing rocks, though they are an iconic constant across all our currency changes maybe those rocks are weighing the currency down…
If you are having coffee with me, I would tell you that one thing about my countrymen, we will make jokes and come up with cool nicknames for the currency and just try to our best to survive.
So whats going on in your neck of woods?… Are you out watching for the eclipse? It wont show this side of the world, so if the world is ending, we would be safe, right? 😂
~B
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