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Veteran banker Nicholas Vingirai has warned that Zimbabwe’s financial system is “broken,” blaming repeated policy shifts and weak regulation for destroying banks’ ability to fund business.
Vingirai, who founded the former Intermarket Holdings group and now chairs Transnational Holdings, told delegates at the In Conversation with Trevor Ideas Festival in Nyanga that commercial banks have become little more than transaction houses. “We have destroyed our financial sector,” he said. “They don’t have the capacity to fund even established businesses, let alone a startup.”
The comments come as Zimbabwe’s lenders face shrinking balance sheets, tight liquidity and regulatory uncertainty. The Reserve Bank has adjusted interest rates multiple times in recent years in an effort to stabilise the Zimbabwe dollar, moves that Vingirai said have distorted pricing and crippled credit markets.
“If your regulator tweaks or changes interest rates often, you are not going to have direction,” he said. “The market is not signalling properly as to where interest rates are going.”
Vingirai, one of the country’s earliest indigenous bankers, built Intermarket into a financial-services group spanning merchant banking, discount houses and insurance before it was placed under curatorship in 2004 amid Zimbabwe’s banking crisis. The group’s assets were later folded into ZB Financial Holdings.
He said the collapse of merchant banking and development-finance institutions has left Zimbabwe with a financial sector that cannot support industry or exports. “We are looking for funding in a system that has broken down,” he said.
Vingirai’s remarks underscore the structural problems confronting Zimbabwe’s economy as it grapples with dollarisation, inflation and limited access to offshore credit. Bank lending to manufacturing and agriculture remains minimal compared with the early 2000s, when merchant banks played a central role in funding working capital and capital expenditure.
Once a dominant shareholder in financial and property groups including Mashonaland Holdings, Vingirai has since retreated from most of his board positions following shareholder disputes. Still, his assessment of the sector carries weight given his role in shaping Zimbabwe’s early banking infrastructure.
“The banks are no longer doing banking,” he said. “Until we fix that, we are not going to grow this economy.”
