Two candles, the price of life in power-starved Zimbabwe

Midwives at a public clinic in the southern city of Bulawayo added two candles to a list of necessities pregnant women must bring before admission.

Mothers-to-be must also have a box of matches - along with the more predictable five nappies, baby clothes, blankets and two towels.

Midwife Rose Sibanda said it was extremely difficult for women to deliver during one of Zimbabwe's power cuts. "There needs to be two people holding the candles while the other is delivering the baby," she said.

Power cuts have become the order of the day in ageing president Robert Mugabe's run-down nation: court hearings are sometimes held by candlelight and doctors have been forced to perform operations lit by wax tapers, according to reports. Eye specialists worry that studying by candlelight - which many school pupils are forced to do - will cause sight problems.

Locals joke bitterly that a romantic dinner is one illuminated by electric light.

The outages have had a devastating effect on Zimbabwe's battered manufacturing sector, which only gets 22 per cent of the scarce total generated by the state-run ZESA power utility.

There are ways of getting round the outages for the rich.

At night, the well-heeled suburbs of Zimbabwe's cities - like Mount Pleasant in Harare - hum to the sound of generators powering satellite TVs. Newspapers run adverts for industrial generators: "Downtime costs money, get a generator," one urges.

Township residents spend much of their lives in the dark but complain they still get monthly bills from ZESA of around 130. Those sums are impossible to find for most Zimbabweans who survive on less than 100 a month. Even a qualified lecturer at a polytechnic can only hope for a salary of 122.

The power utility says it is owed 231 million by defaulting consumers and has vowed to resume disconnections on Monday, the day after the World Cup final in South Africa.

For mothers, the candle requirement adds to the cost of delivering a baby in a country where free health care remains a pipedream. Pregnancy check-ups at a state-run clinic can cost more than 30, scaring away many. At least eight Zimbabwean women die each day giving birth, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Midwives and doctors often refuse to attend to expectant mothers who have not brought surgical gloves for staff. Thirteen per cent of Zimbabweans are HIV-positive and 3,000 die per week of AIDS-related causes.

"If you do not have gloves they will tell you that they cannot and will not attend to you," mother-to-be Silibaziso Mhlanga of Bulawayo said.

New mothers who cannot pay maternity bills in the city of Gweru are smuggling babies out of hospital.

Hopes a coalition government between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in 2009 would bring prosperity are foundering: inflation has crept back up to 6.1 perc ent and the IMF has revised down expected growth this year from 6 per cent to 2.2 per cent.