Mr Mugabe,

Call yourself a President? Call yourself a world leader?

You insist that Zimbabwe is a democracy, yet your policies do everything to remove and decision taking process from the people - and, indeed, from the MDC.

Your party lost the election in March 2008 and yet you continue to rule Zimbabwe. You lost the first round of the Presidential election, but then had your party officials remove the ballot boxes to an unknown place, the results only made public some five weeks later - once they had been crudely re-engineered to more palatable figures.

And in the meantime you had your party brigands beat, torture and murder members of the MDC en masse - until such time as your opponent had no real choice but to pull out of the sham election.

The land invasions continue, but you toe the party line that the land is being ‘returned to the people’. You yourself announced a policy of “one farm - one family” and - yet your family now owns multiple farms.

Lead from the top, not from the mouth.

You say the land is for the ‘landless blacks’ - and then hand the appropriated farms to your party henchmen.

What happened to the “willing buyer - willing seller” policy agreed to in the Lancaster House Agreement?

Now Zimbabwe can no longer feed itself, has largely run out of fuel, has abandoned their own currency (to put it your way - “shelved”), unemployment runs above 90% and health care and education remain dreams unfulfilled for the people.

“Homes for all by 2000” and “health for all by 2000” were great one liners, but when 2000 dawned, so did the madness of your reign.

The less we say about the Gukurahundi, the better, you might think but the lives of between 20 and 30 thousand people remain uncompensated, uninvestigated and unpunished.

What say you twenty years plus hence? Nothing. Very little has changed since then.

You often cry to the free world that your (since when is it yours? You are not even a full Zimbabwean!) country is the subject of illegal full economic sanctions. I suppose if you repeat it often enough, some of it has to stick.

You are responsible not only for the destruction of an entire economy, people and country - but also for the lack of education offered to tomorrow’s leaders. What say you now?

You eat, sleep and drink ZANU PF - but has it not crossed your mind that the star is waning, that the people no longer swallow your strut and bluster, no longer want to be led by an individual who should have retired twenty years ago? Have you not got the message from the Zimbabwean people (myself, in the diaspora, included) that ZANU PF have outlived their own gluttony and overstayed their welcome?

Has the avarice of such people got no excess? Perhaps the people of Zimbabwe will be a little more understanding of your predicament if you were to speak to them, not at them. Explain yourself and take your lumps like a man. It will help that you encourage your hierarchy to follow suit.

Mercy may not be a word in your vocabulary, but it is a word in ours.

Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man