Moves to allow people to buy small amounts of foreign currency from bureaux de change through their phones need to be pursued as this will remove the need that many had for using the street dealers, but at the same time not putting an intolerable strain on the pool of foreign currency or intensifying pressure for dollarisation.
As explained by Deputy Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion David Mnangagwa during question time in the Senate last week, the plan revolves around letting ordinary people buy small amounts of foreign currency, "US$20 or US$50", but not to see them convert their ZiG accounts into US dollars.
Importantly, the buyers will be charged official rates. This would probably mean the interbank ask rate, what banks sell foreign currency for, which is around 2,5 percent at the moment above the interbank mid-rate that is usually quoted as the official rate.
But this is the real market rate, set by the banks in their daily trading of the bulk of foreign currency, not the fake rate the profiteering black market dealers are trying to charge.
Many people presently have needs for some foreign currency in the multi-currency system we use, with transport being the most obvious. Both service stations and kombis charge in US dollars, largely because most fuel at the moment continues to be imported using free funds, that is foreign currency that is not bought from banks.
This makes fuel different from most imports and the system was introduced to end the fuel queues and shortages. It also takes care of the curiosity of Zimbabwean national accounts.
At present we import a little more than we export, but inflows of foreign currency are greater than outflows. The difference is largely the diaspora remittances and these, quite informally and often passing through many hands before reaching a service station forecourt, largely fund the largest single import, petroleum fuels.
As the ZiG becomes ever more accepted, and as the multiple actions taken by the authorities to smash the black market succeed, we will reach the stage when most of the remittances are converted to ZiG through the receiver's bank, as what happens in most countries. At that stage all imports will be via a bank and the majority of transactions will be in ZiG.
But, at present most people need small amounts of foreign currency. The Government itself and some private-sector employers now pay a proportion of salaries in foreign currency. The informal sector is notoriously heavily reliant on foreign currency transactions.
But that still leaves a lot of people who are not earning their own foreign currency yet still need to buy fuel, pay bus fares and make other small payments in foreign currency. They have been forced to break the law and find a black market dealer who will sell them the few dollars they need. This is why a legal route is so important. We can start separating the real criminals from those forced to breach the regulations.
The actions to break the black market need to hit both the supply and the demand side of the market. The demand side has already been weakened by the stability of the exchange rates and the robustness of the ZiG in the commercial dealings within the banking system.
That has seen importers generally wanting to use their banks, rather than a criminal dealer, as the source of foreign currency to pay for imports.
The desperate desire to convert all local currency as soon as possible after it is receipted into foreign currency to preserve value is now also lessening.
The supply side has been tackled by a strong campaign against dealers, with more than 100 now remanded in custody awaiting trial after magistrates hearing bail applications were far from convinced that dealers would be off the streets while awaiting trial. Some did not seem to have fixed addresses, another problem since they could just vanish into thin air.
The measures outlined by Deputy Minister Mnangagwa will also help shut down demand, by removing a fairly large number of people from the customer lists of the street dealers, and will be providing a legal market for those wishing to sell diaspora remittances or other small sums of foreign currency quickly and easily and legally via a bureaux de change.
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Banks could obviously buy and sell US$20 bundles of foreign currency, but their charges tend to be higher.
Bureaux de change are largely set up as small businesses, often with the owner running the till, and are equipped to dealing in small sums. That is why they were created in the first place as tourism started to grow around the world.
The other measure that Deputy Minister Mnangagwa spoke about was allowing mobile money service operators to reintroduce the agents that had to be closed down when it was found so many were abusing the system.
The far higher level of monitoring now possible of mobile money operations after software upgrades means that abuse can be seen in real time and hammered, so allowing the convenience of physical cash to more people for small transactions.
Rural people in particular, have largely been converted to an almost pure electronic money culture, since banks are not village businesses, but many need physical cash, both in ZiG and US dollars, for small transactions, and the small agents could provide this.
