New Currency!

On the 1st August, the Governor of the Reserve Bank announced that we are going to have a new currency, it will still be called Zimbabwe dollars, but three zeros will be removed from the end. So 1 million dollars has become 1000 dollars (Zimbabweans are calling it the Kilo dollar). The reason for this is that the shops and banks computers were no longer able to cope with the huge long figures now being used as a result of the 1500% inflation.

Most people felt that this would have to happen at some point, but the crazy part has been that the announcement came on the 1st August, and the new money was introduced from the 2nd!

Both types of currency are currently in circulation until the 21st August, when the old notes will become redundant. So we are all busy spending our old money. The funny thing is when you go to a cash point or get change in a shop they give you old money, so you can never get rid of it! It is looking like they haven’t printed enough new currency to go around.

Businesses and banks were thrown into chaos on the 2nd as apparently it is not possible to operate accounts using two different currencies, so they all had to close down for a couple of days while they did financial year ends and wrote new software to handle the new currency! I don’t know much about accounts or economics, but when the 21st comes, it will be interesting to see what happens.

This has happened in a couple of other African countries before, but they were given at least 3 months warning, and 6 months to change over to a new currency!

Well can’t write too much in case I get in trouble, but you can read more on www.thezimbawean.co.uk, or any other Zim news website.