Money No Longer Talks in Mugabe's Empire

Propping up the corner of the Keg & Sable, the Old Reliable held forth: "The problem with Mugabe is that he is not a good dictator." He drained his beer and pushed the glass across the bar with a satisfied nod. The barman, taking the nod for a signal, rummaged in the refrigerator and triumphantly came up with a refill. He deserved it; the line was a good one.

"Mugs", the incompetent dictator. Zimbabwe, where the trains do not run on time - in fact they don't run at all. The closest thing to a passenger train they have seen in Harare, for the last three months has been "Bob Marley and the Wailers", racing over the potholes.

One knows Bob is coming when, for no apparent reason, the traffic comes to a halt. Then there is a banshee howl and a single motorcycle outrider hurtles by, elbows puffed out with self importance.

Two Mercedes follow, loaded with bodyguards, then El Presidente behind the tinted glass of a stretched limo. Following is a truck of glaring soldiers.

The glares are understandable when one considers that since 1996 there have been five ballots of one sort or another in Harare - referendums, elections, by-elections and so on - and Mr Mugabe hasn't won one of them. They don't like Mr Mugabe in Harare. In fact, despite the efforts at ballot box stuffing, nobody seems to like the little dictator very much in the second city, Bulawayo, either.

Like many colonial towns, Harare does have a certain faded gentility, although it has abandoned all efforts to maintain appearances. Somehow it is all typical of the dictator who longs to be a legitimate ruler.

He is almost like the old National party in South Africa in his eternally doomed efforts to claim legitimacy. Just as the Nats tied themselves in knots in the 1950s in their efforts to "legitimately" disenfranchise the coloured voters by packing the senate, so Mr Mugabe tries to deal with Morgan Tsvangirai through his cowed courts. The result is almost inevitably counterproductive.

Mr Tsvangirai's defence counsel, George Bizos, a veteran of some of the great anti-apartheid trials in South Africa, must have enjoyed a good laugh this week when the state tried to amend the treason charges against his client after his two co-accused had been discharged. There were certain difficulties, Mr Bizos pointed out, in sustaining conspiracy charges against a single accused. And then there is the black market, which has become such an integral part of life in Zimbabwe that it has been renamed the "parallel market".

Of course no dictatorship is complete without a black market, but Mr Mugabe has managed to create something particularly bizarre in Zimbabwe's version.

Inflation and the black market are the subject of much droll humour in Harare, a lot of it no doubt familiar to survivors of the Weiner republic. ("Joe Soap was robbed today, pushing a wheelbarrow full of bank notes. Poor bugger, they took the wheelbarrow... "). But of course the impact on the vulnerable is no laughing matter.

A pensioner, who, with her late husband, devoted a life to teaching in Harare, goes through her weekly shopping. She had bought eggs, bacon, a bottle of cooking oil, bread and a bottle of local brandy (flavoured cane spirit), six sausages and a packet of beans. She had planned to treat herself with a piece of fish, but could not afford it. "I still can't get to grips with what inflation means," she confesses.

Her pension is Z$34,000 (£24) a month, her weekly shopping costs Z$50,000 and the fish would have cost another Z$23,000. It doesn't take a maths wizard to tell what this means. The difficulties of getting to grips with inflation and the black market were compounded weeks ago when Zimbabwe ran out of money.

Mr Mugabe's government dealt with the problem by interrupting a run of Z$50 notes - worth less than squares of toilet paper - and over-printing them on one side as "bearers' cheques" worth between Z$5,000 and Z$20,000. They have a limited life, some expiring next week, others at the end of June - raising the prospect of a national game of monetary musical chairs as the due dates approach.

There is some excited talk in Zimbabwe about the country's previously despised Z$500 and Z$1,000 bills being worth more than was previously realised. The notes have a silver strip, which, rumour has it, has a high platinum content.

With platinum worth twice as much as gold, the notes are allegedly being exported to South Africa for the extraction of the metal. The story sounds like an urban myth, but is encouraged by a recent ban on the export of bank notes - and the fact that newer notes of those denominations are no longer distinguished by the metallic strip.