[Cincinatus' Wife]

Zimbabwe's Mugabe to relinquish leadership this year*** LONDON (AFP) - South African President Thabo Mbeki has told US President George W. Bush that Robert Mugabe will relinquish his leadership of Zimbabwe's ruling party by December, the Independent newspaper reported.

Such a move would pave the way for Mugabe's exit as Zimbabwe's president and new elections by June 2004, the British daily said, without citing its sources.

It added that Mbeki's assurance to Bush that Mugabe will stand aside is believed to be based on a personal promise extracted from the Zimbabwean leader.

The Independent also said Bush had pledged a reconstruction package for Zimbabwe worth up to 10 billion dollars over an unspecified timeframe, if a new leader takes over.

The deal was discussed by the two leaders during a private meeting in Pretoria last week, the paper said in a report by its Southern Africa correspondent, Basildon Peta, who added that important differences remained. ***

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Zimbabwe -- A quick guide to duplicitous doubletalk and deceit***There is much in the troubled central African nation that is not as it seems. And much that is said that, to an outsider, seems incomprehensible.

And so it was last week when the most equal of all comrades and lord high chief of the Zany party said that the More Drink Coming party must repent before talks begin.

Puzzled foreigners asked why the More Drink Coming party should repent, but troubled central Africans, being fleet of mind, knew that the More Drink Coming party has to repent being beaten, bludgeoned, tortured, murdered, raped and otherwise suppressed by the Zany party.

That is the way it works in the troubled central African banana republic. And indeed in banana republics the length and breadth of the troubled continent. It tells us that if the troubled central African basket case has adopted nothing else from the bland, neo-liberal imperialists in the West, it has at least purloined Orwellian logic.

From the drug-crazed warlords of Liberia to the mad king of Swaziland, the situation, and the same upside down logic, is the same.

Those same neo-liberal western imperialists wonder why this doesn't worry troubled central Africans. They wonder too why troubled central Africans aren't turning into embarrassed central Africans, because the behaviour of the government is surely cause for deep embarrassment.

Well, it would be if anyone took much notice of government. Government might be important in the US, or Britain perhaps. It certainly is in Germany, where people fawn over their rulers. But troubled central Africans don't believe that government is anything more than a necessary evil, a bureaucratic stumbling block that must be endured and where possible undermined. ***