President Emmerson Mnangagwa revealed that Zimbabwe intended to join the Rand Monetary Union when the Zimbabwe dollar collapsed in 2008 but was put off by the demands made by South Africa.
He said some of the demands were simply unacceptable and no country could ever agree with them.
Speaking in a wide-ranging interview on a local radio station on Friday night, Mnangagwa said:
In 2008 after the local dollar collapsed the former administration (led by former President Robert Mugabe) that I was part of the set up a committee of five.
I was part of that committee and we decided to approach South Africa with a view to joining the Rand Monetary Union.
We were given a check-list of conditions to meet. Some of them were unacceptable.
South Africa’s Reserve Bank wanted to know our GDP and other things that we did not agree with, even any other would not have.
This was because they would have had to print the requite value of currency for circulation in Zimbabwe.
He said that after failing to join the Rand Monetary Union, the government decided to adopt the rand unofficially by including it in a basket of other currencies as is the case until now.