Despite the recent wave of bloodshed and the hopeless poverty in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe is to stand for another five-year term in the 2008 presidential election.
But he did not get an easy ride at yesterday's Zanu-PF meeting, if reports emerging today from the central committee are to be believed.
The 83-year-old president's desire to continue was endorsed by senior colleagues only after a lengthy meeting. Even close lieutenants had to be persuaded that it was not time for a change of candidate after 27 years of Mugabe's increasingly brutal rule.
The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) called the Zanu-PF decision a tragedy. And they're not the only ones who feel the party's central committee has let the country down.
As the committee met at party HQ,
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He is a savage with total disregard for human life, says an old adversary
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down the road at the New Ambassador Hotel one of Mugabe's former Zanu colleagues, Enos Nkala, was telling journalists that he would fight to the last drop to ensure that Mugabe does not win next year's election.
"He is a savage with total disregard for human life," said Nkala, one of the prominent figures in the founding of Zimbabwe's struggle for liberation. The original Zanu party was formed in his house in 1963, and after independence in 1980 he served in the new government for a decade before falling out with the president.
He said Mugabe's recent crackdown on MDC members, which has involved abductions and severe beatings, showed the president's "primitive and uncultured nature".
Nkala questioned Mugabe's background. "He talks about his mother always, where is his
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