The announcement that the party planned to reintroduce the currency was made at the 12th national people's conference that ended in Bulawayo on Saturday.
"To instruct government to work out modalities for the reintroduction of domestic currency alongside the multi-currency system in order to address the current liquidity crisis and to enable our people to carry out their transactions," one of the resolutions says.
"This is madness," said Sheilah Moyo of Budiriro. "What do they hope to achieve by reintroducing the Zimdollar? Everything is fine right now and we don't want that currency.”
The plan has won the backing of Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, even though Finance minister Tendai Biti insists that the Zimbabwe dollar will not return anytime soon. Gono suggested reviving the dead currency and linking it to gold reserves held in the country.
"We will obviously take into account our national reserves in terms of strategic and precious metals such as gold reserves for back up," Gono said.
The Finance Minister declared that he would not put the local dollar back into circulation until the economy was achieving growth rates of at least 60 percent capacity utilisation.
"Biti is right," said airtime vendor Shame Moyo. "Zanu (PF) and Gono killed that currency and its unacceptable for them to call for its return. That currency caused suffering. We don't want it."
Economists say the re-introduction of the Zimbabwe dollar can only be contemplated when certain fundamentals have been achieved.
"We need to ramp up capacity utilisation so that we have adequate cover. It’s too early to contemplate the return of that currency. It risks all the economic gains achieved so far," said a Kingdon Bank analyst.
Post published in: Business