The Government has set up a committee, the Liquidity Management Committee (LMC), to control excess money in the market to guard against exchange rate volatility and inflation.
LMC comprises officials from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development.
Finance and Economic Development Deputy Minister Clemence Chiduwa said that LMC will ensure that when ministries, departments and agencies request funds, Treasury will release the funds on condition that the cash is available.
Chiduwa said this while addressing the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) 2023 Annual Economic and Business Outlook Symposium in Harare on Wednesday. The Sunday Mail quoted him as saying:
I have heard quite a number of people saying the Ministry (of Finance and Economic Development) accepts to make payments but then later on they don’t honour.
It has happened once but going forward we now have a Liquidity Management Committee.
The Liquidity Management Committee ensures that whatever is requested by the ministries, we only honour on condition that the cash is available.
This again is going to assist us in terms of managing the liquidity that is given out.
Chiduwa said the Government has resolved to run a cash flow budget to ensure expenditure did not go beyond collected revenues.
He said Treasury had collected $2.04 trillion in revenue as of September 30, 2022, with expenditure amounting to $2.2 trillion. Said Chiduwa:
We have come up with a policy to ensure that whenever we make huge payments at the same time, we are also going to unleash our open-market operation.
This will make sure that if we are going to release $40 billion next week, our open market operation will also be in the market at the same time to make sure that we mop up any excess liquidity.
We have seen that if you look between November and December 2022 to January 5 this year, there was quite a lot of cash in the market because we were paying our wheat farmers, contractors and all that.
But from January 5 up to now, there are no Zim dollars in the market and we have made sure that at any point in time we also do our open-market operation.
The open-market operation entails the use of instruments such as treasury bills of 90 days and 180 days where businesses with Zimbabwe dollars buy the bills.
Companies and individuals with local currency can also buy gold coins, which are used as a store of value and can be sold back to the Government after 180 days.