It’s been like this for three months. The first thing when I wake, I press the switch on my bedside lamp. Six days a week there is no response. The power is off. It will be like this for at least 12 hours. It sinks any positive charge I may have woken with, and the mood will underlie the whole day.

This week I gave a lift to Charles, a technician with the sinking state power utility company. He said last month he and 250 other technicians went for interviews in Botswana with the UK National Grid. “We all got offered jobs,” he said, and laughed when I asked if anyone would be left in Zimbabwe.

I check my landline, which has been dead for three weeks. The phone is not just silent, you can hear the deadness. The batteries in the local exchange have run down because of the persistent power cuts.

I try my mobile instead. The red “network busy” sign flashes with the first ten attempts. It can go on like this for 20 minutes. Congestion became severe immediately the Price Monitoring and Stabilisation Task Force ordered the mobile companies to halve their tariffs. Everyone can now use the telephone with no regard for the cost, and does – if he can get a signal – all the time. The sense of isolation that comes with being without functioning telephones for extended periods is profound.

Mugabe's curbs lead to panic buying

State-imposed price controls that force retailers to sell goods for a fraction of their value have left shop shelves bereft of groceries

• Zimbabwe’s silent genocide

• Mugabe calls in thugs to police prices

• Zimbabwe’s top cleric urges Britain to invade

BACKGROUND

• Zimbabwe panic buying after Mugabe edicts

• Zimbabwe’s silent genocide

• Mugabe calls in thugs to police prices

• Zimbabwe’s top cleric urges Britain to invade

• Teachers sell sex to buy food as Mugabe cronies get richer

Nyarai, my housekeeper, arrives nearly two hours late. There are almost no commuter minibuses. Fuel is unobtainable from service stations since the owners were ordered to cut the price to about 18p a litre two weeks ago. She had to walk for an hour and then struggle in a heaving mob to get on to an open truck. My friend Nicolle couldn’t find a hairdresser that was open. They all had power cuts and those that had generators didn’t have fuel.

The big OK supermarket near me also closed for a day because it had no diesel for its generator. TM supermarket has not closed, but inside people are running toward the back of the shop to join the bread queue. At the checkout till everyone looks hungrily in everyone else’s shopping basket for something they missed on the thinning shelves. A woman in front of me had a box of 30 litres of milk in cartons. It will coagulate in the freezer before she can use it. I snatched up two packets of bacon. I don’t eat bacon from one year to the next.

We are all behaving abnormally. Because we all know that before long there will be nothing left in the shops and there will be no fuel and we will have to hunt around the black market for food and fuel, and even that is bound to dry up and then everything will stop.

Everyone knows that what the Government of Robert Mugabe is doing is not just bungling, not just senseless – but mad. It feels as though we are slipping, out of control, God only knows into what.

Jan Raath is Zimbabwe correspondent for The Times

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