dyton mupawaenda
ZIMBABWE has a good reputation in international banking circles having adopted many best practices and taken the necessary steps to make sure we are not a conduit or source of laundered money, so trade with us can be done hassle free.
At the same time the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the Government have through sensible and enforced rational fiscal and monetary policies brought financial stability and tamed the black markets.
They have also eliminated much of the dubious and illegal activity of those who want to make their money through speculation and criminal activity.
A good deal of this enforcement of banking rules and the Reserve Bank and Government policy can be credited to the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.
This is a fairly small team that has managed to ensure that laid down monetary policies are largely followed. Those who try to ignore or defeat the rules find themselves in serious trouble which can include large civil penalties and loss of a lot of money.
Now the team will be deployed outside Harare, with the Bulawayo office to open in a couple of months, something that should be fairly easy since the Reserve Bank already has offices in that city.
This also supports the Government policy of having services devolved where possible, so that everyone who needs to interact with that service can do so fairly easily.
The unit is then looking at setting up offices in other provinces and this should not be particularly difficult, the main need being some office space and the links to the major databases and good communications now possible.
A lot of the work of the unit, as its name implies, is gathering the necessary intelligence to take effective action to those who break currency and banking rules, and that needs more than just peering into screens watching the movement of money, important as that activity can be.
In Harare, people who find themselves faced with businesses that break the rules on what currencies to accept and the like find it easy to phone or message the FIU, and get a thank you reply quite promptly followed by an investigation. The problematical behaviour has ceased by the time the person making the complaint goes back for their next visit.
Spreading the officers of the unit across the country allows more people to contact the team easily, and a lot of the intelligence must come from such contact since those breaking the rules do not announce that they are doing so and would rather the authorities never found out.
It also means investigation can be a lot easier and quicker when someone is only a short drive away from the offender and can easily check out the complaint or the suspicion and confirm that illegal activity is taking place, or clear the business under suspicion which benefits the law-abiding.
So the spreading of the FIU wings has a double benefit of getting more on-the-ground information and intelligence and being able to take effective action.
This will become an ever larger proportion of the FIU’s likely work. The officers sitting in front of screens watching money move between bank accounts have been so effective that a lot of those breaking the rules now no longer transfer money through the system, knowing that this leads to an investigation and the imposition of penalties.
The drop in such impositions shows that the system does work, by making the fiddling that used to be common now too expensive to continue.
The result has been the currency stability we have been seeing along with a lot less of other despicable practices.
So more of the nasty work is now done more secretly, using cash as much as possible. At the same time the hammering of the biggest players has still left the thousands of little money manipulators, dealers and cheats operating, and getting a grip on them is obviously why the FIU both wants to expand and to spread itself around the country.
Just having the larger manipulators out of action is only a first stage.
We need to see the medium and small offenders reined in as well so that everyone moves into using their innovative temperaments into crating and growing honest and productive businesses. That has the dual advantage of still enriching the innovator, legally now, and also enriching the country by adding value.
In an ideal society we do not need enforcement, but no society is ideal and Zimbabwe, with its dual currency system, is more vulnerable than most.
But the major drive of the Second Republic to eliminate corruption and associated activity has made enforcement of proper rules and laws easier.
This is because the whole enforcement system is orientated towards having a clean society while encouraging growing and innovative businesses, making it clear that this growth and innovation is to be applied to legal and honest businesses, not cheating and impoverishing one’s neighbours.
Online Reporter