“We are sitting on a time bomb,” Misheck Shoko, the Mayor of Chitungwiza, said as he gestured towards a concrete pipe spewing thick brown effluent into a stream outside the town’s main sewerage treatment plant. The stream feeds the Manyame Dam, which supplies the capital, Harare, with its water. “It’s a miracle there have not been more outbreaks of disease.”

Across Zimbabwe the scene is the same: townships that were once models for Africa have become stinking health hazards. The big cities are not much better. Some parts of Bulawayo have not had water for seven weeks. Refuse collection in Harare is sporadic. Power failures are routine.

In small towns such as Bindura and Shamva to the north, rubbish is collected by ox wagon. Zimbabwe is fast sinking into the past.

The meltdown of one of the continent’s best infrastructures has been years in the making, the result of underinvestment and mismanagement. But the speed of the decline over the past few months has been astonishing. Zimbabweans long accustomed to hardship cannot remember a worse time.

It has been driven by a crippling shortage of foreign currency. Since the seizure of white-owned commercial farms began in earnest nearly six years ago, agricultural output — the mainstay of the economy — has dropped 80 per cent. Without dollars the Government cannot buy the £70,000 worth of parts it needs to fix the sewerage plant in Chitungwiza, where dozens of people have already contracted dysentery. It also cannot buy fuel.

Service stations have not had petrol or diesel for months. Fuel can only be bought on the black market — at more than four times the official pump price. Air Zimbabwe cancelled all its flights for a day last week because of a lack of jet fuel.

Prices have doubled in the past month. Annual inflation reached 411 per cent in October, according to official numbers. But TM, a supermarket chain, estimated that it was closer to 700 per cent, based on a typical shopping basket. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the economy will decline by 7.2 per cent this year; GDP is $4.3 billion (£2.5 billion), barely half of what it was seven years ago. A US dollar now costs Z$61,000 at official rates; Z$85,000 on the black market.

The effects of the economic crisis are visible everywhere. People queue for hours just to buy maize meal, sugar and bread, and pay for a trolley-full of goods with briefcases full of cash. Supermarkets, which change their prices every week, have started installing note-counting machines at their tills.

Only 15 of the country’s 175 railway locomotives are in running order. The state-owned Zimbabwe United Passenger Company, which runs Harare’s bus services, is broke with debts of £410,000. Hospitals, receiving an increasing number of patients suffering from malnutrition, are creaking under the strain. In a recent parliamentary report Harare Central Hospital said that it may have to close because so many nurses were leaving — 30 over the past two weeks — because of poor wages and a lack of medical equipment. No more Aids patients are being accepted for treatment because of a shortage of drugs. Thousands of soldiers have been sent on compulsory leave because there is not enough food and money.

Across the country commuters have turned into hitch-hikers. Demand for bicycles has soared. At Zacks Cycles, opposite the railway station in downtown Harare, Yossi Tal, the manager, said that he had sold thousands of heavy, single-speed bicycles this year to companies such as British American Tobacco. “Considering the situation here, it’s been a good year,” said Mr Tal, one of the few businessmen who can afford to smile.

The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe said recently that a typical family of six needed Z$11.6 million a month to survive. But with wages unable to match inflation, the 20 per cent of adults with formal jobs usually earn about Z$3 million a month. Those with access to foreign currency, or who have relatives abroad, are coping. But many others are not.

“I eat one meal a day, for lunch,” Chamunorwa Makarawu, a resident of Mabvuku township on Harare’s eastern outskirts, said. “Air pie for breakfast and supper.”

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