MY MAID, Nyarai, failed to turn up for work yesterday. There was no public transport and private minibuses have doubled their charges since a 283 per cent increase in petrol prices a month ago. She was unable to call because the telephone boxes no longer work.

Nyarai would have come if she could. Her boyfriend is on forced leave because the textile factory where he works as a machinist can work only half time because of power cuts.

Zimbabwe is a country rich in resources and with great potential. It used to have a well-oiled infrastructure that even South Africa, with its far bigger economy, envied. It was robust enough to withstand the first two decades of President Mugabe’s rule but it has now reached the point of collapse. An advanced society is returning to the primitive.

Turn-of-the-switch technology for heating, cooking and water is being replaced by fuel gathering, wood fires and water collection on foot. The bizarre and dysfunctional is the norm and very little surprises people.

The expression “the wheels have come off” is on everyone’s lips.

In Colquhoun Avenue, an upmarket area of embassies and apartment blocks, a young man uses a long metal rod to break twigs from trees for kindling.

On Samora Machel Avenue, hundreds of battered white Japanese minibuses — the core of Harare’s commuter fleet — form a mile-long queue for petrol. Roads into the city from townships on the outskirts are thronged with people who have to walk to work.

The country’s sole sugar refinery closed this week. There is ample, locally grown, raw sugar but no coal for the refining process. Wankie Colliery, the state-owned company that sits on one of the world’s biggest coalfields, has suspended production. The massive dragline that scoops opencast coal was halted when it ran out of spares. There is no foreign currency to import new ones.

Harare Hospital, which serves the capital’s townships, is on the verge of closing. Unable to purchase coal, the hospital has its boilers out of action and cannot sterilise instruments, launder bedding or cook food. Air Zimbabwe, the state-owned airline, could soon be grounded. It confirmed this week that it had only “two or three days” of fuel. That is more than most motorists have. A two or three-day wait in a fuel queue no longer ensures a full tank.

Most queues outside service stations are referred to as “hope queues”, where people leave their cars for a week at a time. When a petrol tanker arrives, bedlam erupts. Opportunists cut in front of those who have waited. Fights break out and sometimes shots are fired. Riot police arrive late, blaming the fuel shortage.

In the past month, the South African and Mozambican utility companies that supply Zimbabwe with power have declared the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority, the state company run by Mr Mugabe’s brother-in-law, as an “interruptible customer” because of its failure to service its £22 million debt. This means that the company gets only ten minutes’ notice of power cuts.

Factory machinery jerks to a halt. Companies moulding tyres or plastics are left with hard, useless lumps oozing from moulds. The Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce estimates that fuel and electricity crises have cut industrial output to 35 per cent of normal.

Officially inflation is running at 228 per cent. In reality it is out of control. The official exchange rate is 824 Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar but on the black market it is 2,200. A white loaf cost five Zimbabwe dollars in 1998; it now costs 350. A businessman carjacked in the affluent suburb of Borrowdale last month offered 10 million dollars as reward for his year-old Mercedes SUV. That was the sum listed in the national budget ten years ago for procuring vehicles for the entire police force. The central bank still refuses to print denominations bigger than 500 dollars. At banks, depositors line up with sacks of money. At the withdrawal counter, tellers and customers can barely see each other over the wall of notes.

The 500 dollar note is nicknamed the Ferrari because it is red and goes fast. It is disappearing from the streets as people hoard it. The central bank is not printing more because it has no foreign currency to import the high-quality watermarked paper and silver strips. Commercial bank officials say that it costs 700 Zimbabwe dollars to print a single 500 note.

This week a bank told a businessman who buys large quantities of cotton in peasant areas that it could offer him only 50 dollar notes. “He laughed,” the bank manager said. “He says he needs one billion dollars a week. In fifties, that’s 40 cubic metres of banknotes.”

This week it cost me 2,750 dollars to airmail a letter to Britain containing three A4 sheets of paper. I covered the back and front of the envelope with 100 dollar stamps — the highest denomination — except for a small patch where I wrote the address. Interestingly, the stamp features a pretty sketch of the Tokwe Mukorsi dam, which has not been built because Cabinet ministers have been fighting over bribes for the lucrative tender for the past 15 years.

The cheapest telephone call is now 24 dollars, but the largest coin is 5 dollars. The coin boxes in busy public telephones would fill much faster than the post office could collect the coins, so they have been removed. They would be replaced by computer chip card phones “depending on the availability of foreign currency”, a spokesman said.

Signs of poverty

Life expectancy at birth: 42.9 years, down from 56.0 years in 1975 Proportion of children dying before they are five: 11.7 per cent Proportion of adult population with HIV/Aids in 2001: 33.7 per cent

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