Zimbabwe's finance minister Mthuli Ncube says the country will do everything possible to clear its foreign debt by December 2025 in order to open new lines of credit to help revamp the economy.
Zimbabwe's total public and publicly guaranteed debt stood at $18 billion in December 2022, made up of $12.8 billion in foreign debt and $5.2 billion in domestic debt, as per a debt bulletin published by the treasury.
Of the external debt, $5.89 billion is bilateral debt, whilst $2.7 billion is owed to lenders, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB).
The majority of this multilateral debt, $2.47 billion, is arrears and penalties for failure to pay.
The finance minister said the country was committed to servicing its debt in spite of Zimbabwe's poor economic performance over close to 30 years, Bulawayo 24 News reports.
"I met representatives of the IMF and the World Bank in the US, where we agreed on a framework for us to repay our debts. We are hopeful that we will have cleared all our debts with international lending institutions and countries that we owe at the end of 2025," he stated.
Since receiving the special drawing rights allocation from the IMF in 2021, Zimbabwe has made a total of six drawdowns, totalling $857 million, used to fund health, infrastructure development projects and agriculture.
Furthermore, Zimbabwe owes money to international financial institutions including the European Investment Bank and China Eximbank.
Last year, Zimbabwe launched a campaign led by the AfDB aiming to reach a debt restructuring deal with major creditors. As it stands, Zimbabwe owes China $2.03 billion, which was predominantly used for infrastructure.
According to Zanu-PF's acting information director Farai Marapira, Zimbabwe should service its foreign debt by making sure all economic sectors are productive. "We cannot service debts by taking other debts. We have to build our economy by making ourselves productive, thereby making ourselves net profit earners."
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