HARARE – Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono has called for a blanket amnesty for people who committed political crimes over the past decade in order to promote national healing and reconciliation.Gono who has been accused of running a parallel government at the RBZ and operating outside the law, did not say why he felt the amnesty should cover only the last 10 years.
The RBZ chief, who made the amnesty call in his latest mid-term monetary policy review statement, said: "As a central bank, the advice we give to our leadership in the various stations in our communities is that we build genuine national healing through the implementation of a stakeholder-defined amnesty.”
He said the general pardon should cover, “all those Zimbabweans who may have injured sections of society due to the cloud of suspicions, mistrust and conspiracy theories that characterised the country's socio-political and economic landscape over the past 10 years or so."
"For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither advocating for the closure of our courts nor the opening of freedom flood-gates at all our prisons, but rather the construction of a platform for stakeholders to submit cases that merit consideration for amnesty in the spirit of true national healing,” said the RBZ governor.
Arguably Zimbabwe’s most controversial central bank governor to date, Gono, is accused of printing money to fund activities ordinarily undertaken by the government ministries through allocations from the national budget.
Critics say most of the money Gono printed actually went to funding President Robert Mugabe’s political programmes and paying for the lavish style of top officials of Zanu (PF) party and security chiefs who back the veteran leader.
Many Zimbabweans have called for Gono to be investigated for overshooting the statutory limit of US$1 billion that he is allowed to borrow without Cabinet approval.
Gono has admitted to borrowing more than US$5.25 billion since June 2004 to finance his activities although there is no tangible evidence that the money went to good use.
* The Zimbabwean
