KEY POINTS:
It is pitch dark across Harare. By 7.30pm the streets are deserted, with only occasional car headlights moving along the unlit wide avenues, and warning lights blinking through junctions where the traffic lights no longer work.
Power cuts have become worse in the past two weeks. There is a shortage of coal and several of the generators at the Hwange power station are broken, awaiting new parts to arrive from who knows where.
The Electricity Regulatory Commission says bills will rise by 350 per cent within six weeks.
In downtown Harare Gardens, a humming generator keeps the spotlight running inside the tiny Theatre in the Park - built like a traditional thatched hut, wooden benches circling a dirt floor stage where an actor in army fatigues is battering a dummy so hard the stuffing is oozing out.
The soldier's instructions come from a loud voice on his mobile phone. The louder the voice gets, the more the audience fidgets.
Political satire is illegal in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe and this is powerful stuff. The Good President tells the story of a "gogo" (grandmother) who comes to the city for medical treatment and tries to raise the bus fare to return to her village to vote back the ruling president in the coming elections. This is the same president who murdered both her sons in the gukurahundi - the opposition purges by Mugabe in 1983 which left thousands dead. It's a deeply taboo subject.
"The actors are brave to say this dialogue, but anyone who comes here has courage," says writer Cont Mhlanga.
"Last night, when we opened, the audience was swollen by secret police, about 10 or 12 that we could tell.
"I wrote this script in two days after the opposition were beaten on March 11. It's about the cause of our problems not being political, economical or external, but cultural."
Mhlanga was arrested last year for "mobilising illegal protests against the Government through theatre".
Now he waits for them to come back, to close his play down - or worse.
All of Zimbabwe is waiting. "Waiting for that ageing geriatric bastard to die," a bus driver told me.
Not far from Harare Gardens, in an office looking out on the towering Reserve Bank - dubbed "Bob's Takeaway" by Mugabe's less respectful subjects and now occupying an entire block - a new approach to the overthrow of the elderly dictator is being masterminded.
Here a senior opposition figure said half the key figures in Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party were now ready to work with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
It is known that Zanu's faction leaders - notably Solomon Mujuru and Emmerson Mnangagwa - are feeling the squeeze on their own economic interests.
"They are scared - Mugabe is deeply paranoid and well-known for keeping fat files on friends as well as enemies," the opposition source tells me.
"Zanu have made their wealth, their land, their houses and their children's foreign university fees all from him. But they are not stupid. He is an old man. We are close to breaking point, but we are not there yet.
"There is potential for serious civil unrest, but people are frightened. But the more hunger they feel, the less afraid they will be."
Showing documents to back up his claims, the adviser to MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai says he believes the end of 27 years of oppressive rule will come before elections in March next year. "I can't see us lasting another five years - something has to give now."
For all MDC's confidence, it still has a factional split to heal while the fear of Mugabe and his intelligence forces is palpable.
This month, two newspapers ran a list of 600 names of people arrested for "political offences".
The courts are run by political appointees although sudden moments of justice still shine through. Journalists are routinely arrested. People are afraid to talk.
Although there are no known cases yet of anyone being arrested over the contents of a text or email, no one takes any chances.
Every day the Government-run Herald has stories attacking foreigners and whites for the state of the country. This month the Government extended the two-year prison sentence for unaccredited foreign journalists entering the country to include anyone "harbouring" them.
This month, a black man was beaten up by two police officers after hugging a white Zimbabwean, an old school friend, in a Harare street.
I spoke to a mother at Harare hospital where she was waiting for her 19-year-old son to come out of surgery - she said his leg had been broken by soldiers just for walking past the Zimbabwe television company building - a key destination for anyone plotting a coup and where this month the guard suddenly increased.
At the same time, the Government cancelled licences of all aid groups working in Zimbabwe, accusing them of working against the president. Hundreds of thousands of people depend on food handouts, especially in rural areas where land reforms have wrecked agriculture.
The economy runs on two levels - the official, where US$1 ($1.35) is valued at $250 Zimbabwean, and the illegal rate, where US$1 is Z$18,000 to Z$24,000.
"It makes us all criminals, we are a nation of crooks, and the only way to survive is to work out how to best break the law," a former farmer turned pilot said as he described the convoluted and illegal way he gets aviation fuel.
On April 18, Zimbabwe's Independence Day, the goldmines stopped. The country's biggest mine said it had stopped production because of a shortage of foreign currency needed to import cyanide, a key chemical in the production process.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has not paid the mine for gold delivered since October last year and new taxes being imposed - and backdated - were "simply crippling," a mine economist said.
The price of a loaf in the shops stood at between Z$6000 and Z$10,000, depending on how much air you like mixed with your flour and yeast.
This month's biggest queues were for sugar, but stocks of the staple food, corn meal, are low too. The big grumble at the moment is over rip-to-the-touch-thin blue toilet paper.
And so Zimbabweans, squeezed from every possible angle, wait.
Thirty minutes' drive out of Harare is the region of Porta Gardens, all golden grass and graphite trees smudged against blue skies.
These plains are home to the people ordered out of the city by the men who bulldozed their homes and street stalls. The Murambatsvina (Clean up Rubbish) drive in Harare and Bulawayo began in 2004 but is continuing. Mugabe doesn't like street vendors.
Hidden down a red-dust track is one settlement of about 200 people. They shelter in rubble and rags of plastic and rely on aid handouts, fish pulled out of the nearby lake, and what they can coax from the dry earth.
People still in the city are not always doing much better. Sarah, 27, waits for a job. Wearing her smartest blouse and skirt, the former secretary, one of Zimbabwe's 80 per cent unemployed, walks the 18km from her township home to central Harare at least twice a week.
"You can't just sit at home," she said. "I come just in case there is something here for me."
She cannot afford the buses - ticket prices have risen 350 per cent in a month. Families whose husbands, sons and daughters have joined the exodus overseas of three million Zimbabweans wait for the day when they can come home.
People wait for the day when their children can go to school - more than half are no longer in school and teachers are not being paid a living wage.
"There is a significant brain-drain abroad," says Jameson Timba, of Zimbabwe's Private Schools Association.
"Families are being broken up. The middle class has been particularly decimated, which has implications on this country's human resources," Timba says.
Sekai Holland is in the spotlessly clean Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg. After two attempts she was finally allowed to leave Zimbabwe this month after the intervention of the Australian Government - her husband Jim is Australian.
Holland, 64, was with Tsvangirai and other opposition figures arrested and battered at a rally on March 11.
Her arms are black with bruises, her ribs and a wrist are broken and she is about to have further surgery on her leg.
"We are all proud of how we reacted on March 11," she says. "It was a lesson for us, that what we had been failing to get across to people was that we needed change by peaceful means - but now the youth especially are starting to understand that.
"We are bringing a new culture of non-violence, methods of passive resistance.
"As they beat us not one person wet themselves or fouled themselves, not one asked for water.
"So, you see, in the battle of ideas we won. That I know because, even as I lay in hospital with two guards with their guns sitting on my bed, we were praying together as Zimbabweans.
"A list of names of those police responsible for the beating was put under my pillow by our friends in the militia, who were ashamed of what the brutes did.
"Now we can be inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King."
There is a long road to freedom. The Zanu-PF Government will soon embark on a new exercise of dishing out more land to peasants as part of an election campaign.
But in his Harare office, an MDC source leans forward and smiles with confidence: "You know The Last King of Scotland?
"Last night I watched it for the third time. It is so familiar, it is the same as here - Mugabe is cleverer than Idi Amin, but the brutality is the same.
"This old man's terrible destruction of this country will end too - and soon.
We will need help from you, from the West, but you must back us, not try to overrun us.
"We have the people and the ability to sort this out."
Then Zimbabwe can celebrate independence.
- OBSERVER
