REUTERS

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe. Picture: Reuters/Philimon Bulawayo

Thirty-two years ago this month, Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF trounced their rivals in internationally supervised elections, a dawn of democracy in a country torn apart by a protracted bush war.

They won 57 of the 80 seats available in the House of Assembly, and started the new era on a warm, conciliatory note, with Mugabe borrowing the biblical reference to call on citizens to beat their swords into ploughshares. After the years of blood and hostility, there was a lot of hope for Zimbabwe.

Thirty-two years on, and on his 88th birthday today, Mugabe is still in power. His birthday interviews show no signs of a graceful exit, nor any willingness to relinquish his grip for the good of his country.

“All the people support that I stand,” he told the Sunday Mail, thundering on about the need for an election this year to end the three-year-old unity government.

“There is no-one who can stand and win at the moment. You have got to groom a candidate,” he said, as though it was someone else’s duty to do so.

Mugabe is correct in believing that foisting a leader on the party would cause more divisions in it, but he should have thought about this decades ago. Unwittingly, perhaps, he was declaring his own shortcoming.

It could have been seamless in Zimbabwe, like Nelson Mandela’s retirement and his handover to Thabo Mbeki. It would have spared our neighbour ruin and misery. Mugabe has evolved instead into a living reason for limited office, shouting to the world the wisdom of no more than two terms.

He has fiercely retained power by using distraction, which has turned out to be a hazardous art in Zimbabwe. So there he was in his birthday interviews, again shaking his fist at the world, including our own government which has opted – at some pain to itself – to pursue the route of persuasion with Mugabe.

After more than 17 years of it, though, its dividends are disappointing.