Zimbabwe has the second largest gold reserves per square kilometre in the whole world with 13 million tonnes of proven reserves.

Then VP Emmerson Mnangagwa said In 2017, “We are building reserves of gold and diamonds which if they reach a certain level I will not tell you here, it will then allow us to introduce our own currency that will be backed by those minerals. I am not at liberty to disclose to you the level that we want those minerals to reach before they can back our own currency.”

At a price of US$1,250 per troy ounce, reached on 16 August 2017, one tonne of gold has a value of approximately US$40.2 million.

The total value of all gold ever mined (190,000MT) would exceed US$7.5 trillion at that valuation and using WGC 2017 estimates.

Using the same spot price and estimating 10% of total gold reserves mined, Zimbabwe sovereign wealth reserves would be equal 1.3MT or US$52 trillion.

That’s more than 6 times more than the total global reserves of the rest of the world, and yet Zimbabwe struggles to supply bread, fuel, medicine and other basic raw materials to their population.