The Sunday Mail
Emmanuel Kafe
A craze for antique items has for the past few years hit the country.
We have moved from old charcoal irons, the Rhodesian penny and tick, and now the old Zimbabwean bearer cheques are selling like hot cakes in Harare’s central business district and on online markets.
Men and women mill around street corners with wads of bearer cheques, trading them with bond notes.
In between these busy streets there is a bus terminus, Road Port, where dirty water from a burst pipe flows silently down the street and litter fills the potholes.
Yet, this grubby place is seeing more trade than some of Zimbabwe’s banks.
Here, the black market is king and the new bond notes and old bearer cheques are pawns that can be sacrificed for US dollar notes.
However, what boggles the mind is why the old bearer cheques are still on demand when they are no longer legal tender in Zimbabwe.
In Harare, note collectors are operating along Jason Moyo Avenue, between Third and Fourth Streets.
It was established that the old notes and bearer cheques are now a fortune in people’s lives. Local note collectors in town are paying substantial United States dollars for the notes which they in turn sell to numismatists outside the country.
Numismatists are students or collectors of coins, bank notes and other payment media used to resolve debts and the exchange of goods.
The notes now fetch more than what the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) paid out during the demonetisation of the Zimbabwean dollar.
Denominations that are in demand among note collectors are the 500 million, 50 trillion and 100 trillion dollar notes.
Note collectors pay as much as $8 for one 100 trillion dollar note, $2 for the 50 trillion dollar note and 25 cents for the 500 million dollar note. lt also emerged during the snap survey conducted by The Sunday Mail Society that Zimbabwean old banknotes, particularly the “bearer cheques” with face value of up to 100 billion dollars are changing hands on eBay for hundreds of times their actual worth.
eBay is an online market place which buys and sells antique goods, cars, books and sporting goods, among other items.
The seller chooses to accept bids for the item (an auction-type listing) or to offer the “Buy It Now” option, which allows buyers to purchase the item straight away at a fixed price. The notes are believed to be fetching a lot as collectors’ items on online market places.
On e-Bay, the 1 000 trillion dollar note is fetching as much as $64 and the 50 trillion dollar note $39, while the 500 million dollar note fetches $8.
Some tourists are also buying these notes and they later auction them on online markets for a fortune. Tourists are known to pay up to $20 for a single note in the resort town of Victoria Falls.
“I buy a 100 trillion note for $10 if they are many, but they have to be clean,” said an Indian trader who sells fabrics in downtown Harare.
There are representatives of collectors in cities that include Harare, Bulawayo, Mutare, Gweru, Kadoma and Kwekwe. The representatives then engage youths in the respective towns to do the rounds with posters.
In Harare, some youths who are moving around with the posters said that the representatives can be located at popular bus terminus like Copacabana, Road Port and Charge Office.
The poster, which has several contact details for persons in different cities, shows several old Zimbabwe dollar notes which the collectors can pay for.
An effort to engage the Kadoma representative over the phone was futile as his mobile phone was unreachable, but the representative in Harare picked the call and confirmed that they pay varying amounts of US dollars for different old Zimbabwe dollar notes.
“We are collecting the old Zimbabwe dollar notes and pay varying amounts of US dollars for different old Zimbabwe dollar notes. Where are you?” he asked.
A note collector at Road Port, who declined to be named, said business was good as a number of people still have their old bearer cheques. The note collector has engaged a number of agents who are dotted around the CBD, collecting the notes on his behalf.
He explained how the bearer cheques have attracted so much attention from numismatists and why they are fetching a lot of money around the world.
Bearer cheques were in circulation at the height of hyper-inflation in the country. They were phased out in 2009 following the adoption of the multi-currency system.
“The 100 trillion dollar note is considered as the highest denomination to have ever been printed by a country. That’s basically how these notes have gained traction on the market all over the world. Business is good, one cannot complain. This is something that I do part-time to earn a bit of cash,” said Philip, a money changer at Charge Office.
Tonderai Samu, who collects bearer cheque notes at Copacabana bus terminus, when asked about the purpose of the old Zimbabwean dollar notes, said they are collecting them for historical reasons.
“We sell history. It is just like someone who hoardes old wrist watches for five years and sell them for the next generation for a much more price than the original price. It is for historical purposes, just like keeping items in the archives,” he said.
