HON. MISIHAIRABWI-MUSHONGA: Mr. Speaker, I move that his time be extended.
HON. NDEBELE: I second.
THE HON. SPEAKER: Thank you, please proceed.
HON. MARIDADI: Thank you Mr. Speaker and I will be very fast.
Mr. Speaker, the rate of the Bond note is now 2:1 when I compiled that but today I went to Fourth Street. Mr. Speaker, you need to have three Bond notes to get one United States Dollar and United States Dollars are available at Fourth Street, Eastgate and Copacabana – brand new $100 bills are available and yet our Reserve Bank does not have money. Mr. Speaker, should we now call Copacabana Reserve Bank or should we continue to call this tall building here Reserve Bank? I do not know and the Hon. Minister of Finance and Economic Development must fight to stem that.
Let us go to the next slide, 2016 budget deficit hit $1.4 billion or 10% of national output from a projected 150 – that is bad and that one alone could actually cause a Government to resign – [HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear.] – Without even moving a motion of no confidence in the Government, that alone would have caused the President to fire the entire Cabinet and appoint people who are capable. I am one of them, not that I want to be Minister but I think I am capable – [Laughter.] –
Mr. Speaker, subsidies to farmers are not budgeted for in this country. You suddenly wake up and hear that we are giving farmers subsidies and that is inflationary. Food imports following a devastating drought, we continue to import food and we are not a net importer of food. I was on Twitter and there was a Minister, I shall not mention his name because he is not here. He was celebrating that we are going to build a shopping mall and I said, Minister, we do not need shopping malls in the country. What we need is the productive sector, why do you celebrate construction of a supermarket? Why do you need construction of supermarkets even like Choppies? We do not need Choppies, we need OK Supermarkets because what Choppies is doing is mop-up of United States Dollars and expatriate them to South Africa – that is all that Choppies is doing in this country.
Mr. Speaker, all they are selling are imported goods, fast moving consumer goods – [HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear.] – Anyone who comes to Zimbabwe to sell fast moving consumer goods is not good for the country. Actually, there is a memo at Choppies that says, ‘You can bank everything else but United States Dollars, you keep them in the till.’ An Indian man comes in the morning to collect all the United States Dollars and they are spirited out of the country then you wonder where foreign currency is going. It is going to South Africa because you allowed Choppies to come here, we do not need supermarkets, we need the productive sector.
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