HARARE - Finance minister Tendai Biti will be staggering the civil service and pension payment dates over a period of at least four business days between payments.

The latest move attests to the crippling foreign exchange shortages blighting the troubled coalition government. The new pay dates, to be announced soon, will come into force next month.

“We will review the four monthly civil service and pension payment dates to allow for a time lag of at least four business days between payments,” Biti told a news conference Wednesday.

“At the moment, you have a crowding out effect in that government pay days are crowded out and concentrated in a short time space. That doesn’t give time to the system to breathe and recover before payment of one transaction and another huge transaction. And we hope to implement this in February 2012.”

The troubled unity government, battling a crushing liquidity crunch, also announced a cocktail of measures to support orderly transactions within the financial system. Biti said from now onwards, banks will also be staggering payments of high-value transactions, in order to allow them sufficient time to plan for such transactions.

“We will be introducing a system of Notice Periods for high-value transactions, in order to give banks adequate time to prepare for the processing of budget payments,” he said.

“Notice periods will be related to the value of the transactions, up to a maximum of seven working days.”

The Daily News heard that festive season expenditure pressures clogged the financial institutions and caused logjams in the RTGS system because of economy-wide high volumes of high-value transactions, compounded by payments for civil servants salaries and bonuses towards the end of December 2011.

“Just on salaries and bonuses alone we had to fork out the sum $300 million in November and December alone which is a colossal amount, as a result there were delays and temporary suspensions on RTGS payments,” Biti said.

He said this had adversely impacted on the processing of budget payments for government projects and related payments.

To augment cash allocated in the 2012 national budget and bolster liquidity in the money market, Biti announced that treasury will be withdrawing $110 million from Zimbabwe’s General Special Drawing Rights Allocation Account at the IMF, money allocated in 2009 under a $250 billion global agreement to strengthen the reserves of all 186 IMF member states in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Zimbabwe says it wants $10 billion in foreign aid to reconstruct the country, struggling with rundown infrastructure, toxic politics and unemployment of over 90 percent.

But Western nations have withheld aid over policy differences with veteran President Robert Mugabe, and have been ambivalent to release cash without concrete signs of political and economic reform under a unity government he formed with rival Morgan Tsvangirai, now Prime Minister.

The aid that has flown in has mainly been humanitarian.