Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank has borrowed $985 million from African banks to purchase fuel and other critical imports, its governor John Mangudya told parliament.

Mangudya said on Monday in Harare that the money was borrowed from Mozambique’s central bank, the African Export and Import Bank (Afreximbank) and others.

Zimbabwe is in the grips of a severe dollar crunch and last month ditched a discredited 1:1 dollar peg for surrogate bond notes and electronic dollars, merging them into a lower-value transitional currency called the RTGS dollar.

The new currency (RTGS dollar), which exchanges at 2.5 to the U.S. dollar, is an attempt by the government to stem chronic cash shortages. (Reuters/NAN)