Kelvin Chisanga’s currency prayer: “Zambian Kwacha’s outright performance needs serious housekeeping!
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Kwacha’s outright performance needs serious housekeeping!
By Kelvin Chisanga, Communications Specialist in Lusaka, Zambia
On Monday 7th September 2020, this week, we saw the Kwacha continued in sliding against the US dollar as supply from corporate sellers and exporters appear to have dwindled much further amidst some relatively stronger demand on the interbank coupled with the prevailing country’s macroeconomic instabilities.
In the recent weeks, we have continued to seeing depreciation accelerating in the Kwacha due to dwindling US dollar which has remained subdued.
Going forward, the local unit will likely to start receiving some relief if the markets get stabilised though it has a lot of uncertainties as we face COVID-19, and we expect to see the harmonisation of issues surrounding some of the mining exporters like the Mopani Copper Mine get settled pretty soon.
Mopani Copper Mine has in the past weeks been disturbed due to an ongoing shareholding issue and it, being one of the foreign exchange players in the local market may have also played a significant role among many other macroeconomic factors at play in the nation.
The movements in the exchange rate are a clear indicators signalling that our local economy needs an expanded export base especially targeting non-traditional exports such as honey, sugar, cements, etc.
Kwacha’s performance will be dictated mainly based on the supply and demand factors with dynamic market fundamentals and systems playing a major role.
As a nation, we also need to start recording reduction in most of unnecessary imports by building capacity to the local potential producers and we should moderate on local resourcing to promote local SME potential.