A British Lord who was in Zimbabwe in February to arrange a bail-out for Zimbabwe with his bank apparently told the British government to start talking to reformers within the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front because President Robert Mugabe’s end was near.
According to The Express, Lord Mandelson, chairman of Lazard International, advised the British government that Zimbabwe urgently needed "encouragement, debt restructuring, and an injection of additional liquidity" to prevent an economic collapse because the country was fast running out of cash.
Mandelson said one could not talk business in Zimbabwe right now because "any discussions of business – or indeed most aspects of life – was inevitably a discussion of politics and the intense speculation and manoeuvring over the succession to President Mugabe….”.
"It is clear that the endgame is underway, and the battle is being vociferously played out in the Zimbabwean press. Less clear is how it will end and who will prevail – and whether it will play out while the president is still alive," Mandelson was quoted as saying.
Last month, the British government was taken to task in the House of Lords for trying to bail out Mugabe.
It denied this insisting that Lord Mandelson had visited Zimbabwe in his personal capacity.
There has been intense factional fighting in ZANU-PF, especially between Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa and G40 which allegedly backs the First Lady, Grace Mugabe.
Mugabe's death has been predicted so many times that one one time he quipped: “The day will come when I will become sick. As of now I am fit as a fiddle…I have died many times. That’s where I have beaten Christ. Christ died once and resurrected once. I have
died and resurrected and I don’t know how many times I will die and resurrect.”
His former advisor Gideon Gono told United States ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee on 4 June 2008 that Mugabe had cancer and it had “metastasized”- spread through his body- and, according to doctors, he would die in three to five years.
The three years came and went and so did the five years. Mugabe is still alive eight years after Gono's statement.
Ed: Mugabe's survival in politics has baffled many. I am, however, not one of them because I have a reasonable explanation of why he has survived this long. Read about in my ebook: God, Mugabe and The West.
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