President Robert Mugabe, the world’s oldest head of state, marked his 93rd birthday with lavish celebrations in Zimbabwe yesterday, despite a deepening economic crisis in the southern African country.
In power for 37 years, Mugabe told the crowd that he had no intention of stepping down.
“People who are busy forming their own groupings saying Mr Mugabe must go. I ask myself where should I go?” Mugabe said in a speech that was broadcast on state radio and television.
The elderly statesman spoke for over an hour, adding that he would not choose a successor as this was the role of the party.
“Others are saying ‘President, choose a successor before you retire’. Is that not imposition? Me imposing someone on the party? No, I don’t want that,” Mugabe said. “This is an issue for the congress to choose. 
“We can have an extraordinary congress if the president retires but you said I should be your candidate in the next election.”
Mugabe criticised the factional infighting that has taken place without a clear succession plan.
ZANU-PF has endorsed Mugabe as its candidate for general elections next year, and he remains widely respected as a liberation hero by other African leaders.
He has avoided naming a successor, but his wife, Grace, 51, is seen as a possible candidate along with Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
This year, the ruling ZANU-PF threw a birthday bash believed to have cost about $2mn for thousands of guests in Matopos, about 600km southwest of the capital Harare.
Yesterday’s party included a feast and several vast birthday cakes, angering some Zimbabweans as the country endures severe food shortages.
One of the cakes was shaped like Mugabe’s official Mercedes-Benz limousine.
Mugabe celebrated his actual birthday on February 21 with a smaller cake-cutting ceremony.
Mugabe wore a suit emblazoned with his own image, decorated in the black, red, green and yellow party colours of ZANU-PF.
His wife Grace wore a matching outfit, as did other senior members of the party.
Mugabe addressed his own mortality in the speech.
“It’s not always easy to predict that, although you are alive this year, you will be alive next year,” he said. “It does not matter how healthy you might feel. The decision that you continue to live and enjoy life is that of one personality we call the Almighty God.
“We should thank the Almighty God that I was able to live from 92 years last year to 93, but much more than that I was able to live from childhood to this day – that’s a long, long journey.”
Mugabe said he only had one sister left and missed his siblings, adding that “when I look back I say, ‘Aah, oh Lord, why were these taken before me and why have I remained so long, alone and alive’. I cannot answer that.”
Anti-government activist Promise Mkwananzi criticised the decision to host the celebrations in the Matabeleland region, the site of a massacre sanctioned by Mugabe in the 1980s.
On his Facebook page, Mkwanazi also described the money spent on the birthday party as “idiotic” and “frivolous”.
Holding the event at a school in Matobo has also riled locals as it is close to where many victims of Mugabe’s crackdown on dissidents in the early 1980s are thought to be buried.
At least 20,000 people are believed to have been killed in the massacres by North Korean-trained Zimbabwean troops, according to rights groups.
“This should not be a place for celebration,” Mbuso Fuzwayo, spokesman for the Bulawayo-based campaign group Ibhetshu Likazulu, told AFP. “The whole area is a crime scene where the bones of victims of the massacres are buried.”
Born on February 21, 1924, Mugabe trained as a teacher and taught in what was then Rhodesia and Ghana before returning home to join the guerrilla war against white-minority rule.
He became prime minister on Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain in 1980 and then president in 1987.
All schools around Bulawayo were closed on Thursday and Friday to prepare for the celebration, which was attended by some ambassadors and foreign dignitaries.
“Our children were told their classrooms have been turned into boarding facilities, and they (were) frogmarched to join the birthday party,” local poet and opposition activist Desire Moyo told AFP.
Zimbabwe’s economy is set to contract by 2.5% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
More than 80% of the workforce scrape a living in the informal sector, while the government has failed to pay civil servants’ salaries in time since June.


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