BY VENERANDA LANGA CIVIL society organisations have amplified their voices by demanding debt transparency and to know what the country’s US$18 billion debt was specifically acquired amid indications that ordinary Zimbabweans now have to pay heavily through taxes to service that debt. Finance minister Mthuli Ncube told Parliament during his 2020 mid-term budget and economic review statement last week that total public and publicly guaranteed external debt stood at US$8,094 billion, while domestic debt, including the Zimbabwe Asset Management Corporation (ZAMCO) ZW$1,1 billion debt, stood at ZW$12,89 billion. During a recent virtual discussion on the debt situation in Zimbabwe, which was organised by the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (Zimcodd) and the Crisis Coalition in Zimbabwe (CiCZ), the latter’s chairperson Rashid Mahiya said the country was in a precarious debt situation which needed to be explained to the public. Mahiya said just recently there had been a public outcry over the 2015 Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Debt Assumption Act where government took over US$1,2 billion debts which are currently being paid by ordinary struggling people through taxes. Lawyer and researcher Alex Magaisa recently exposed damning evidence of the beneficiaries of the farm mechanisation scheme, some of whom got as much as US$2 million through a loan facility, but never paid back the money. “It is, therefore, important for members of the public to interrogate the debt situation in Zimbabwe and to know whether Parliament approved or disapproved the debt,” Mahiya said. Zimcodd executive director Janet Zhou said it was also imperative to look at the social and economic justice perspective of the debt situation in Zimbabwe as it is hurting ordinary people. Zhou said Zimbabwe had been in unsustainable debt levels since 2000 and has been borrowing from the domestic market where most of the creditors are pensioners as government could borrow from pension funds. “We already know that our debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio is very high at 84% and compared to the size of our economy it is already an uncomfortable ratio,” Zhou said. “If you look at domestic debt, it shows that government has been violating in terms of debt to the national budget ratio because it should be aligned to the national budget of the previous year but all this has been violated. “Zimbabwe inherited a colonial debt of US$760 million which was mostly used to buy arms to finance the Rhodesian war. But even post-independence the country has been getting resources from the International Monetary Fund – and we know the impact of structural adjustment programs (ESAP) which affected the economy.” Zhou said most of the debts can be classified as odious debts as they financed non-developmental programmes like buying arms for participation in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “From the domestic debt front, we saw a leap in debt from November 2017 which was US$4 billion to about US$9,5 billion in a period of nine months and the question is what was that