Zimbabwe chokes under weight of $13 billion China loans

A man shows a wad of the new Zimbabwe two-dollar notes he received from a bank in Harare on November 12, 2019. PHOTO | AFP

Zimbabwe is choking under mounting international debt as it begins to pay the price for borrowing heavily from China for infrastructure projects at the tail end of Robert Mugabe’s rule.

Beijing funded the expansion of Victoria Falls International Airport and that of the southern African country’s main source of electricity, the Kariba Hydropower Station on the Zambezi River, among other major projects.