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Looks like the SADC wimped out. And here's a shock:

ZANU PF endorses Mugabe for re-election

Saturday 31 March 2007

PRESIDENT Mugabe nominated to stand in next year's election

By Patricia Mpofu

HARARE – Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU PF party on Friday nominated President Robert Mugabe as candidate for a national presidential election expected next year.

If Mugabe wins the 2008 poll as many political analysts predict he most likely will do, he will rule until 2014 to complete 34 years at the helm.

With the United Nations estimating the average life span of Zimbabweans at 34 years, many of Mugabe’s compatriots born around 1980 when he first assumed power would probably die with him the only leader they will have ever known.

Senior ZANU PF officials who attended the party’s central committee meeting that endorsed Mugabe as presidential candidate said political commissar Elliot Manyika nominated the President saying he was the “only candidate and there was no one else”.

“Immediately, without anyone seconding the nomination, the whole room erupted into song, dance and ululating with many delegates repeatedly chanting Gushungo! Gushungo! (Mugabe’s totem),” said a central committee member who spoke to ZimOnline on condition he was not named.

“There was not even debate on the matter, it was well choreographed so much that whoever may have wanted to oppose Mugabe’s nomination did not stand a chance,” added the central committee member.

While the delegates were working themselves into a frenzy singing praises to Mugabe, the 83-year old President then rose to his feet and clapping hands to acknowledge the boisterous support from the floor, he then victoriously marched out of the conference room - on his way to lunch!

“That was it, that is basically how this whole thing was decided,” our source said.

It was yet another sweet victory inside three days for the Zimbabwean leader, Africa’s oldest President and one of the few remaining of the continent’s big-men rulers.

Earlier in the week on Wednesday, Mugabe had faced down southern African leaders meeting in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, managing to get them to issue a public statement virtually backing him and calling on the West to lift sanctions against the Zimbabwean leader and his top officials.

Western governments and Zimbabwe’s main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party had called on Southern African Development Community leaders to use the Dar es Salaam summit to pressure Mugabe not stand for re-election next year – a call the African leaders did not heed, at least going by the communiqué they issued.

Prior to Friday’s ZANU PF central committee meeting, some of the party’s most powerful leaders led by retired army general Solomon Mujuru worked hard to block Mugabe from standing in 2008.

The Mujuru group at first appeared it was winning the tussle with Mugabe when it blocked last December proposals by the President to postpone presidential elections to 2010, which would have given him two more years in office without having to face the electorate. But the anti-Mugabe faction will have to wait for another day.

Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since its 1980 independence from Britain but critics say his policies are responsible for an economic meltdown, which has left the majority of the country’s 12 million people mired in poverty as unemployment rockets while inflation has surged to nearly 2 000 percent. - ZimOnline

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