The Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers’ Union (ZCFU) has accused the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe of lying to tobacco farmers about the means of payment and the use of the e-marketing system. The farmers claim that the central bank made promises it did not keep and kept stringing the farmers along. The farmers were promised $1 000 cash on the first sale and $500 for subsequent sales, but this did not happen.
ZCFU president, Wonder Chabikwa said:
We were promised that at the first delivery, we would get $1 000 cash and $500 cash in subsequent deliveries, [but] come implementation time, it did not come to pass
To make matters worse, money was even taking a week to reflect into farmers’ accounts.
You wonder why this was happening in this age of technology.
…We know it was going to eliminate collusion. If it worked in India, why not in Zimbabwe?
Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union executive director Paul Zakariya added:
It is not proper to promise what you cannot deliver. When the RBZ made the promise they gave the impression that they would be able to honour their promise. But as we continued to monitor the situation what the RBZ promised was beyond what they could deliver. The cash crisis is real.
We started to educate our farmers that we have a real problem and that they should use other means to make payments.
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