China has become the largest investor in Zimbabwe, which has been shunned by the West over its human rights record and is struggling to emerge from a deep 1999-2008 recession that forced the government to ditch its own currency in 2009.
Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said China and Zimbabwe were negotiating the final amount of debt to be cancelled.
“They (China) said they are cancelling our debts that are maturing this year. Right now, preliminarily, we are coming up with a figure of $40 million,”
Chinamasa said in a statement. In the last five years, Zimbabwe has received more than $1 billion in low interest loans from China, which is Harare’s second largest trading partner after South Africa.
On a rare visit to Harare by a Chinese leader, President Xi Jinping this month witnessed the signing of 10 economic agreements, including a $1 billion loan to expand Zimbabwe’s largest thermal power plant.
Chinamasa said Zimbabwe planned to increase local use of the yuan after the central bank last year added the Chinese currency to a basket of currencies used in Zimbabwe that includes the US dollar, British sterling and the South African rand.
Reuters.
