ZIMBABWE has the highest inflation and lowest life expectancy in the world, not to mention the highest percentage of orphans. So desperate is the shortage of food that President Robert Mugabe’s own guards have been spotted shooting squirrels in Harare’s Botanical Gardens.

However, Mugabe, 82, may be rewarded by being made president for life at his party’s annual conference this week.

Among the main proposals to be discussed is postponing presidential elections from 2008 till 2010. But Didymus Mutasa, the powerful national security minister and secretary for administration in the ruling Zanu-PF party, said last week that Mugabe had done “so many wonderful things” for Zimbabwe that it was likely that delegates to the conference would appoint him for life.

“There is a realistic chance that someone among the delegates or one of the provinces could come up with a proposal that he remains the party’s presidential candidate until Amen,” said Mutasa.

“He has done so many wonderful things for this country and its majority population and he is not showing any signs of tiredness. So if it is raised, as I am sure it will be, why not?”

Among those “wonderful things” is turning the country from the breadbasket of southern Africa to a land so famished that there are now long queues at abattoirs to buy waste such as pigskin marked “not fit for human consumption”.

The last official figures issued in October put inflation at 1,070%. But the cost of living shot up by almost 50% last month, according to the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe. An urban family of six now requires Z$209,000 (£442) to meet its basic food, housing, transport and clothing needs for a month, way above the average wage of Z$50,000. So bad is the economic crisis that while people around the world are stocking up on treats for the festive season, Zimbabweans are staring at empty shelves.

“This will be the worst Christmas ever,” said Joyce Taravinga, a single mother in Mbare, one of many who lost their homes in the government’s slum demolition operation. She now has to live with relatives in an already overcrowded shack.

“It’s hard to imagine that we used to have meat and presents. This year it will be a bowl of sadza [maize porridge] and leaves.”

She is hoping to have saved enough from selling bananas to be able to flavour the food with “meat sawdust” — gristle and bone sold as dog food by the abattoir. “We are happy if we can afford dog food,” she said. “We have no dignity left.”

Even the government’s own information shows that living standards have dropped 150% in the past decade. A survey by the social welfare ministry revealed that between 1995 and 2003, more than 63% of rural people could not afford to meet basic food requirements, while the figure in urban areas was 53%. Since then the situation has got far worse.

The lack of nutrition is hastening so many Aids-related deaths that new figures from Unicef reveal that a quarter of Zimbabwe’s children — 1.6m — are now orphans.

“This number is growing,” said Dr Festo Kavishe, the Unicef representative in Zimbabwe. “HIV and Aids have dramatically increased children’s vulnerability in recent years to the point where Zimbabwe now has the highest percentage in the world of children who are orphans.”

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