On the road from Harare to Bulawayo a policeman stopped a motorist at a checkpoint. “I'm hungry,” said the officer. The car was allowed through for the price of a bag of peanuts.

In Zimbabwe's second city, a warden at the infamous Khami prison recounted how he and his colleagues stole the inmates' rations to stay alive. Half a dozen prisoners died each day, he added - if not of outright starvation, then from illnesses that preyed on their emaciated bodies.

A year ago it was hard to imagine that things could get any worse in this still beautiful, once bountiful country, but they have. Today they are much, much worse.

Then millions survived on a bowl of sadza (mealie meal) a day. Today sadza is a luxury and many survive on wild berries, nuts and edible roots. Then it was hard to find children suffering from kwashiorkor or marasmus - diseases caused by severe malnutrition. Today it is easy.

Between a half and two thirds of the population are now entirely dependent on food aid. Cholera is ravaging a population weak with hunger - wags quip that cholera is now Zimbabwe's biggest export. Two thousand a week die of Aids. Time and again you encounter grandmothers raising children because their parents are dead.

Driving along the highways it is now scarcely possible to tell where long-displaced farmers cultivated some of the most productive land in Africa - the wrecked and plundered shells of farmhouses are the only sign. Instead, every scrap of land in urban areas has been turned into sad little vegetable patches by a desperate citizenry: the outskirts of Harare look like a giant allotment. One of the few remaining white farmers told how he now rings his mango orchards with razor wire to ward off thieves.

The roads are crumbling. More and more children go barefoot. People's clothes are disintegrating into rags that hang off stick-thin bodies. Coffins and condoms are the only thriving businesses - or so Zimbabweans like to joke.

A brief flurry of hope after the Opposition won the elections in March was crushed when President Mugabe rigged the results. “The joy has gone out of the people. Now there's just sadness and despair,” said a Western doctor. Ask a Zimbabwean how he is and he will likely reply: “Surviving.”

Most hospitals have closed because their staff have gone abroad or given up working for nothing. In a country that once had a higher literacy rate than the United States, most schools are shut because the teachers have done the same. Water and electricity are treats. Public transport has all but ceased to function. Rubbish is no longer collected. The security services are practically the only part of the State that still functions, but the lower ranks are close to mutiny.

The Zimbabwean dollar has been rendered utterly worthless by an inflation rate that halves its value every 1.3 days. Last Friday, after the Government raised the daily withdrawal limit from banks, it halved every ten minutes. A loaf of bread rose from Z$1.5million to Z$20million.

Wherever possible the Zimbabwean dollar has been replaced by other currencies - the US dollar, the South African rand, even petrol coupons. Barter is now commonplace: The Times was told of a doctor who accepts beer tickets at his club, a school that will take chlorine for its swimming pool, and a mining engineer paid with cyanide.

The lucky few with access to foreign currency still live reasonably, but they are almost all afflicted by another pervasive Zimbabwean sadness. Scarcely a family has not fragmented, the younger generations scattered in search of better prospects. One woman said not one of her twenty nephews and nieces remained in the country.

Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwean State is like a dead tree, its trunk hollowed out by termites. One day soon it must surely topple and crash. But when? And what will be left when it does?

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