Mugabe packs his bags

Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, makes a last desperate attempt to cling on to power as the forthcoming election looms, this time by accusing his main political opponent of plotting to assassinate him.

A private poll indicated that the elections on March 9th and 10th may not go Mugabe’s way, provoking Mugabe to plan his escape route out of the country meticulously. Due to his regime’s policy of murder and intimidation against political opponents, it is feared that were he to lose, he would be imprisoned to answer to his crimes.

However, at a private meeting with President Obasanjo of Nigeria, the main opposition party leader, Morgan Tsvangirai (Movement for Democratic Change) said that in the event of an election victory, he would allow Robert Mugabe to leave the country with dignity, along with his wife, Grace and his three children but he would not be allowed to loot the country’s treasury before he left.

After 22 years of autocratic rule, Mr. Robert Mugabe has managed to skilfully steer his once prosperous country to the brink of ruin. Fostering a policy of belligerence towards the white farmers, the mainstay of the economy, and replacing them with so-called “veterans” who have destroyed the farms, he has brought Zimbabwe to a situation in which the future is extremely bleak.

While Mugabe has been cultivating the few friendships he has left (Cuba, Malaysia, North Korea and Thailand), and his presidential helicopter is on a state of 24-hour alert to whisk him out of the country, it is feared in Harare that he may choose an alternative option: to claim that the elections were rigged by the foreign observers and try to rule the country by martial law.

This 78-year-old pseudo-intellectual despot is at the end of his tenure. He is a pathetic anachronism, a sorry sign of the times for Africa’s outdated line of politicians. Mugabe belongs to the nineteen fifties, not the third millennium.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru