By BUUMBA CHIMBULU
ZAMBIA will next Monday have access to the US$189 million which was approved on Thursday by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under the 38-month Extended Credit Facility (ECF).
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The Bank of Zambia (BoZ) has already confirmed with the Ministry of Finance and National Planning the account in which the money will reflect.
Secretary to the Treasury, Felix Nkulukusa announced yesterday at a media briefing on the IMF distribution that the money would reflect in the BoZ account on Monday next week.
The completion of the first ECF review allows for an immediate disbursement of US$189 million, bringing Zambia’s total disbursements under the arrangement to about US$374 million. Zambia’s ECF arrangement is for a total of US$1.3 billion at the time of programme approval on August 31, 2022.
“Yesterday, we got about US$189 million and this amount, the Bank of Zambia has already communicated the accounting for which it is going and it takes two days for the amount to reflect in our account so we are expecting this money to be in our account by Monday,” Mr Nkulukusa said.
He also revealed that Zambia was expecting more budget support from the World Bank and the African Development Bank by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, BoZ Governor Denny Kalyalya pointed out that the stage to complete signing of the Memorandum of Understanding with the official creditors had been set by the approval of US$189 million.
Dr Kalyalya said this was a missing element for Zambia to sign the MoU with its official creditors. He also said that the US$189 million was split in two forms namely, budget support and building the national reserves.
“We negotiated that we include budget support in the agreement in order to close the fiscal gap as the side need support. So 50 percent will go towards budget support and the other 50 percent will go towards reserve build up,” he said.
Speaking earlier, Finance and National Planning Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane, reiterated that both the official and private creditors would have the same burden as they would be treated equally.
“The thing we know for sure is expectations that the burden of private creditors is going to be similar to the burden of the official creditors. We do not want any of them to think that they have given away too much than the others,” Dr Musokotwane said.
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