Tears behind govt’s statistical glow

📅 Published: August 16, 2025

📰 Source: theindependent

Curated by AllZimNews.com

For all the Reserve Bank’s statistical mastery and Treasury’s rosy mid-year declarations, two veteran economists see past the gloss.

And they don’t like what they find.

In a country where every “record” and “surplus” seems to be wrung from tortured data rather than real industry and jobs, Eddie Cross and economist Chenayimoyo Mutambasere tear through the official narrative with the kind of precision only possible when the facts are impossible to hide.

Cross, one of Zimbabwe’s most enduring economists, strips the budget and monetary statements of their pretence to reveal a state still riddled with waste, leakage, and bureaucratic excess.

He sketches a government devouring more than half its revenue on salaries, starving infrastructure of investment, and allowing ‘ghost’ pensioners to drain public coffers without a proof of life check in years.

In his telling, customs fraud, fuel levy weaknesses, and the ‘smuggling of up to 80% of gold revenues’ have left Treasury’s “surpluses” looking more like illusions than achievements.

His assessment is that the ‘growth’ is neither broad-based nor sustainable.

Mutambasere, of the Africa Centre for Economic Justice, reaches a similarly damning verdict — but via the mechanics of the central bank’s own playbook.

The mid-term monetary policy statement, she argues, is built on statistical smoke and mirrors: rebased GDP, “reserves” bulked up not by productive growth but by forcing banks to park deposits at the RBZ, and gold stockpiles that, while flattering the reserve position, drain liquidity from an already suffocating real economy.

Her analysis shows a financial system strained by high statutory reserves, an informal sector now a staggering 76% of GDP, and deep vulnerability to commodity price swings that could rip the floor from beneath ZiG’s thin stability veneer.

Together, the two analyses dismantle the official “stability” line: If growth is not lifting millions out of poverty, then the Treasury’s and RBZ’s mid-year scripts are less a celebration than an obituary for missed opportunities.

Here is what they say:
From the mid-term budget, it is clear we are spending too much on salaries and far too little on capital expenditure.