Zimbabwe’s plea for international help to halt a cholera epidemic is the most serious official admission yet of how grave the crisis has become.

The Health Minister, David Parirenyatwa, has called on foreign donors to send millions in emergency aid funds, with the unprecedented instruction to send the money through United Nations channels, denying government officials their chance to profit.

Most of Zimbabwe’s foreign aid is channeled through the state-controlled Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which the governor has systematically looted on behalf of Robert Mugabe and his cronies.

The concession from Mr Parirenyatwa, a senior member of Mr Mugabe’s inner circle, is a sign that the Government is “desperate and broke,” one international donor official said. But those who hope that the cry for international help will open a chink in the regime’s political armour is being optimistic, the official added.

Robert Mugabe has long maintained the fiction that his country’s dire situation is the fault of foreign sanctions - so successfully, in fact, that many abroad are unaware of the extent of international aid operations already there.

Mr Mugabe has been more than happy to take Western aid dollars for years, not least because of the millions he and his cronies have made looting aid funds from the Reserve Bank. But the economic and political environment that has seen Zimbabwe’s infrastructure crumble has compromised the impact of foreign aid on the lives of the Zimbabwean people.

The greatest assault on the work of aid organisations was the months-long ban on field work during this year’s election crisis, which halted programmes across the country and almost certainly contributed to the breakdown in health systems that have made the cholera outbreak so hard to handle.

When the government took over food distribution, there was widespread testimony of supplies being denied to opposition supporters and channeled to the army and ruling Zanu PF party militias instead.

The danger is that Mr Mugabe finds a way to politicise the cholera crisis too, by taking credit for solving it, particularly with Morgan Tsvangirai, out of the country. The oppositon leader is seen by many as the key to reversing Zimbabwe’s decline with foreign governments lining up to plough in millions in investment and development into a Tsvangirai government.

Mr Mugabe’s concern is not so much for his own population as it is for surrounding African countries who, tired of the messy overspill of Zimbabwe’s multiple crises, may be moved to stronger action to force him to go. Proving he can work with foreign donors to contain the cholera crisis, which even now is spilling over the border into South Africa, will ease pressure on his neighbours to act.

What Mr Mugabe cannot now reverse, diplomats and analysts all agree, is Zimbabwe’s catastrophic economic slide. It is that crisis which is now leading to the first and most dangerous signs of disorder, with soldiers rioting in the streets of Harare after they were unable to draw their wages because banks had run out of money.

Harare residents were shocked by the sight, not merely because of the rarity of public disorder, but because the rioters were soldiers, part of the state machinery that Mr Mugabe has long relied on to put down dissent.

Half of Zimbabwe’s army is on semi-permanent leave, with the Government unable even to feed them, and finding the funds to pay the remainder is growing ever harder. Relying on their loyalty is no longer a given. “People are beginning to talk about the c-word again,” the official said, referring to a military coup.

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