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Prince Sunduzani, Business Reporter
THE People’s Own Saving Bank (POSB) is on a drive to promote exports to complement Government’s efforts towards increasing foreign currency earnings and help ease the biting cash shortages.
In an interview with Business Chronicle last Friday, POSB chief executive officer, Mr Admore Kandlela, said the bank has come up with specific facilities at affordable rates, which business can benefit from.
He said the bank was reaching out to exporters to benefit from the facility, but could not be drawn to give details on how much was set aside and who are some of the identified exporters.
“What we are trying to promote now is export trade. We realised that as a country even under the new dispensation we are not having much of these exports, which means we are not getting forex but we have a long list of importers who desire to use forex,” Mr Kandlela said.
“We said nationally we have a trade deficit of over a billion dollars and as a bank it’s also affecting us in terms of money. You can’t keep going to the Reserve Bank for all the forex needs. So we said let’s have some set of customers who we can also finance for them to generate the forex.”
Zimbabwe adopted the multi-currency system in February 2009 to tame the hyperinflation that prevailed at the time. Since then, there has been a decline in foreign currency reserves owing to a plethora of economic malpractices as the liquidity crunch persists. Forex shortages have been blamed for crippling economic growth with the manufacturing sector being the hardest hit. Industry captains and economic experts have called for export promotion facilities for the country to be able to address foreign currency and cash challenges.
Mr Kandlela said POSB was offering export facilities, which are being worked on in tandem with the central bank and Zimtrade. “So we have had a set of exporters who we have identified through the central bank.
“We have cheap export finance at RBZ rates (7 percent) and we are saying let them come over and get these facilities and we can create relationships with them,” he explained.
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