Zimbabwe’s central bank denied on Thursday that it fixed the exchange rate of its new transitional Real-Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) currency, saying it would let the market decide its value.
The governor John Mangudya told a committee of parliament in Harare that the bank would never fixed the rate and would never do so in the prevailing case.
The currency has been stuck at 2.5 to the U.S. dollar since Feb. 22, two days after the southern African nation ditched a discredited 1:1 dollar peg for its currency.
The country merged its dollar-surrogate bond notes and electronic dollars into a lower-value transitional currency called the RTGS dollar on Feb 20.
But there are worries that the central bank does not want to further devalue the RTGS dollar, a move which has discouraged those holding dollars to sell at the prevailing rate.
“We have not fixed the exchange rate and we will not fix it,” Mangudya told the committee.
Mangudya said Zimbabwe, which is facing an acute shortage of dollars, imported fuel worth $173 million in January and February through credit lines from foreign banks,
which was enough to cover local demand during the period.
He said the shortages that had been seen since the start of the year were caused by some fuel dealers failing to raise enough money to buy U.S. dollars for fuel imports.
