THE government’s desperate crusade to introduce bond notes ostensibly to cure the shortage of the United States dollar, which had become the country’s de facto currency following the decommissioning of the Zimbabwe dollar, has spawned a raft of jokes on social media.
BY ARTS REPORTER
In one of the videos tagged #ThisFlag, a US dollar note is seen in conversation with a purported one dollar bond note.
The US dollar is questioning its counterpart on reports that they are equal in value, and the surrogate dollar insists they are equal.
Immediately, the bond note is seen multiplying, while they are still chatting, as if it is bowing to inflation.
Sometime last month, the movement came up with its own version of bond notes — which it branded “bond nots” and taunted the monetary authorities, saying if the government could print paper money and attach a value to it, so could the country’s citizens.
The notes were in denominations of 1 to 100, and featured caricatures of President Robert Mugabe and his wife, First Lady Grace.
Comedian Prosper Ngomashi, popularly known as Comic Pastor, also took a jibe at the bond notes in a one-minute 39 seconds skit in which he was being interrogated by police officers over a box of bond paper on which he said he wanted to print bond notes.
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Comic Pastor told NewsDay yesterday that two of his bond notes skits were motivated by what people had been saying about the surrogate currency, whose introduction, people fear would throw the country back to the cash crisis of 2007 and 2008.
“In the second skit, I am just trying to put across what some Zimbabweans might be thinking of the bond notes, whether they are printed on our usual bond papers or not,” he said.
In another clip by #ThisFlag, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor John Mangudya is carricatured with a huge head on a tiny body, pleading with citizens to accept the bond notes.
The clip is labelled John Iscariot Mangudya: ‘Governor Reserve Bank of Mugabe Looters’ Association’.
The jokes seemed to have touched a raw nerve in the corridors of power, with Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa claiming early this month that some unscrupulous characters had already printed counterfeit bond notes.
The remarks torched further comic relief, with people questioning how the bond note — which has been branded a fake US dollar — could have a counterfeit.
Mangudya later rubbished the claims and said Chinamasa could have been referring to social media jokes on bond notes, since it was impossible to have counterfeits of the notes that were yet to be uveiled.
