"There is no blood on the streets of Harare," a South African government minister told reporters after a recent visit to Zimbabwe. From the veranda of the club house at the Harare Sports Club – centre of the ongoing row over Zimbabwe’s hosting of six of the forthcoming World Cup cricket matches – one could almost believe it. The pitch is green and in excellent condition. The banks of trees surrounding the ground are the backdrop to as pleasant a venue as it is possible to imagine for a top-class cricket fixture. The suspension of belief which the minister’s statement implies can be sustained in a journey into the surrounding affluent northern suburbs of the capital city. Expensive cars – the Mercedes limousines and Pajero 4x4s which are the vehicles of choice of the ruling elite – can be seen speeding from extensive homes to shopping centres to offices and back. But that is as far as it goes.

One does not have to look much further to find the shocking evidence of an avoidable, man-made, catastrophe. Lines of cars, buses, and trucks wind back round the city streets from those very few petrol stations which have fuel left to sell. Those with no supplies are deathly quiet. Harare residents can be found queuing patiently in both the richest and poorest areas of the city for the endless list of the most basic commodities in short or non-existent supply. Small plots of maize can be seen on open patches of ground, as people try to beat the shortages by growing their own. Last week, a South African newspaper reported that even someone as senior in the ruling Zanu PF party as Professor Jonathan Moyo, the minister of information, had returned to Harare from a Christmas visit to Johannesburg in a small convoy of vehicles packed with cooking oil, canned food, rice, sugar, maize meal, macaroni, bread, and, of all things, polony.

There is no foreign currency because Zimbabwe’s export industries and foreign currency earners have been devastated by nearly three years of violent political turmoil. Tourist visitors to Zimbabwe (and other countries in the region) have stayed away in droves, put off by the widespread and increasing lawlessness. The vital agricultural export industries – tobacco, flowers, vegetables and maize – are now almost non-existent. The mining sector, another crucial source of foreign currency in times past, has been crippled by the inability to import spares and equipment and by increasing government interference. There is a shortage of banknotes, because the printers are unable to the find foreign exchange to import the necessary paper. There was even a threat to the safety of Harare’s drinking water. The chemicals to treat it are imported and the foreign currency to buy them was only scraped together at the very last moment.

All this is a relatively recent, and urban, phenomenon. While the deterioration in Zimbabwe’s formal economy has been in train for some time, it has really only accelerated sharply over the last three months or so. For the real story, one must travel outside the cities and towns, where the violence and suffering has been unrelenting for three years. Those few reporters who in recent weeks have been able to dodge the police road-blocks and roaming bands of government militia to reach Zimbabwe’s rural areas have returned with horrifying accounts of mass hunger, mass displacement, and the routine political manipulation of food aid by the ruling party and government officials. The statistics are at the same time mind-boggling and mind-numbing. Up to 1.5 million ex-farmworkers and their families have been made both redundant and homeless – refugees in their own country. Over 7 million people are currently classified by the World Food Programme as being in need of food aid.

The government steadfastly maintains that the economic hardships – too bland a description of the current plight of the average Zimbabwean – is the result of drought. And make no mistake, there is a drought. Hungry people in their millions are to be found in almost all the countries of the sub-continent. But droughts are nothing new. They come around in cycles as they have done for centuries. And they are now predictable: modern weather forecasting systems predicted the current poor rainy system months ago. In past, good, rainy seasons, up to 70 per cent of Zimbabwe’s annual maize crop would be grown by the nation’s peasant farmers, producing to feed their families, with small surpluses for market. The balance would come from the commercial farming sector. In past drought years, the total yield would fall, and the shares from peasant and commercial sectors would reverse, with up to 70 percent being produced by commercial farmers under irrigation. With a draw-down from the maize reserves, the country would get by until the rains returned. This drought year, as usual, the peasant farmers’ crops are withering in the dry heat. But for the last two years there has been no commercial sector worth speaking about to take up the slack, and the national grain reserves are down to zero. The most graphic illustration of this is the country’s dams and irrigation reservoirs. They are - on the government’s own figures - 70 percent full, because the water hasn’t been used to grow anything on the commercial farmlands.

The World Food Programme and other international aid agencies have dealt with regional droughts in the past, and are putting enormous effort into relieving this one.

Despite the government’s constant protestations that the country’s ills are due to factors outside their control, this crisis is at root political - not related only to the weather, or to supposed economic sabotage by the government’s long list of perceived enemies.

Yet, embattled as they are, President Mugabe and his party struggle on, in office and in power. There is no blood on the streets on Harare, or, at least, not very much. Both the rural and urban populations have been cowed and subdued by the police and army, now completely politicised and purged of dissenting elements. The hastily-mustered bands of self-styled war veterans who lead the farm-invasions in 2000, and carried out the intimidation of large swathes of the rural electorate in the parliamentary elections in June that year, have largely been replaced by organised detachments of government youth militia. Under the guise of a National Service programme, school-leavers must undergo a period of paramilitary training at one of an increasing number of training camps around the country, if they wish to proceed to further education. They join those press-ganged from the urban unemployed, or those lured with the promise of food and shelter and government jobs once they are demobilised. Dubbed Green Bombers, for their green uniforms and after a noxious local species of insect, they are a common sight throughout the country.

These militia, enforcers for the ruling party, supplement the subversion of the judiciary which has been undertaken over the last two years, the relentless harassment of the independent press, and the ongoing persecution of the political opposition in all its groupings, whether it be the Movement for Democratic Change or the numerous civil society organisations such as the National Constitutional Alliance, church groups and private charities. Beatings and worse are commonplace in the poorer suburbs of the city and towns, particularly where there are forthcoming elections, such as in Highfield and Kuwadzana in Harare. The Highfield constituency, once the scene of Mugabe’s triumphant return to the country 22 years ago, was lost to the opposition in 2000, and the winning back of this area by any means has become a priority for the ruling party. The Kuwadzana by-election is due to the death by poisoning of its opposition MP, Learnmore Jongwe, in the Harare Remand Prison, less than two kilometres from the Harare Sports Club.

In terms of effective political dissent, President Mugabe has, for the moment, sewn things up. The penalties for open expression of dissatisfaction are heavy enough to have driven support for the opposition underground in many areas. When the choice is between being allowed to buy food at the controlled price for your family, or having to scour the black market at unaffordable prices, it makes eminent sense to suppress one’s distaste, buy the Zanu PF card, and attend the party meetings which allow access to government-controlled food queues. The independent press protests daily, the official opposition does what it can in parliament, the few un-suborned judges and magistrates deliver some kind of justice where possible, but the president rules by decree, or acts outside the law where necessary. But, somewhat perversely given the desperate circumstances, there is a growing feeling that the ruling party are backing themselves into a corner.

Mugabe’s tactic in the past has been to buy-off ambition and dissent within his own party with lavish salaries and perks, and with preferential access to government contracts and government-owned businesses. In 1998, when the Zimbabwean armed forces began their fiscally-disastrous foray into the Democratic Republic of the Congo in support of the then President Laurent Kabila, Mugabe’s closest political and military associates were rewarded with business concessions in Kinshasa, and lucrative resource concessions in the Congo’s diamond fields. When faced with open opposition from the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association, he authorised generous gratuities and pensions, which were equally disastrous for the national treasury. And when in June 2000 he faced defeat in the parliamentary elections, having already lost a referendum on constitutional changes in February, he promised the commercial farms to his supporters.

Since then, there have been a number of routes whereby the faithful, especially those at the very top of his party, have been rewarded. The most glaring example is the two-tier exchange rate system, which has proved to be such a distortion to Zimbabwe’s economy. The Z$ is officially pegged at 55 to the US$, and has been for some considerable period of time. On the streets, and in the "parallel" market which was officially-sanctioned until recently, the US$ trades at many multiples of the official rate – most recently at around Z$1300. The favoured few who are allowed access to foreign currency at the official rate can buy their US dollars at Z$55, and then immediately sell at Z$1300, and then do it again, and again, and again. This is what has been sustaining the expensive fleet of cars in the northern suburbs, and the boom in Harare property prices.

But with the collapse of commercial agriculture, tourism and mining, the government has been finding it near impossible to source foreign currency for its own needs, such as importing fuel, over which it has a monopoly. Rather than devalue the official exchange rate to restore profitability to those export industries which remain, and thereby lose the source of patronage which the dual-exchange rate system provided, they have instead all but banned the "parallel" market, hoping that those with foreign currency to sell would helpfully exchange it at the official rate through official channels. The result has, unsurprisingly, been exactly the opposite. Foreign exchange trading has been driven even further underground, hence the queues at Zimbabwe’s filling stations. There was a period in 2002 when the Libyan government was persuaded to exchange their oil for assets – farms, and shares in banks and tourist businesses. But even this source of fuel has dried up, with the Libyans demanding ever higher prices for their oil in terms of Zimbabwean assets, after serial defaulting on the deal by their Zimbabwean counterparts.

There is now less and less with which to buy support for Zanu PF. Two recently reported food riots – one in the western city of Bulawayo, and the other in Chitungwiza, Harare’s satellite city – indicate that the shortages may now be affecting just those government supporters, albeit at a low level in the pecking order, whose support Zanu PF must maintain. In Bulawayo, police fought running battles with 4000 people who stormed a government grain storage warehouse. But this was not a spontaneous uprising by the hungry angered by political manipulation of food handouts. The attack was orchestrated by a local Zanu PF functionary, angered by being left out of the lucrative business of grinding government maize for later resale at inflated prices on the black market. In Chitungwiza, the riot in a food queue turned out to be between rival groups waging a turf war for control of a government food line. Control of such queues can be financially rewarding in terms of preferential access to the food, which can then be resold. Those queuing can also be charged a fee for the privilege of staying in line.

Which brings us back to South Africa. President Mugabe has enough friends in the region and around the world to give vocal support to his policies, and the odd helpful vote at international meetings. President Sam Njoma of Nambia lent a helping hand at the recent Earth Summit in Johannesburg with a scathing attack on Britain’s Tony Blair and US secretary of State Colin Powell. The Chinese permanent seat on the UN Security Council is likely to provide a block to any concerted UN action against him. But the geography of southern Africa has come to the fore, as it has many times in the past. Zimbabwe is landlocked, and while there is a pipeline from the sea through Mozambique up which fuel can be pumped, only South Africa can supply the diplomatic clout, extensive and reliable trade routes, and the economic power to keep Zimbabwe, and Zanu PF, afloat. Like South African President Vorster in his dealings with Ian Smith in the 1970s, President Mbeki has the power to determine events in Zimbabwe. And he has chosen to support his northern fellow president.