Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe has ruled unchallenged for 27 years and is running again in Zimbabwe's next presidential election in March 2008 so he can add another six-year term to the 27 he's already been in power. he's Africa's longest standing dictator. prick of the planet number five. Mugabe doesn't believe that civil society should participate in politics. His ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front is a one-party system.

In 1983 and 84 Mugabe murdered 25,000 people in the southern province of Matabeleland-that's why he wants to stay in office, it keeps him exempt from facing international courts on human rights abuses and going to jail. He knows he belongs in The Hague. Mugabe rejected the United Nations attempt to raise 30 million dollars to aid victims, he says Zimbabwe has no crisis. Mugabe threatened Western diplomats with expulsion if they help provide food, water and medicine.

There's no clean water, no electricity, no maize-meal porridge. Life expectancy 37 years old. 80% of the population unemployed. once Africa's wealthiest nation, today people survive on international handouts. One million Zimbabwean people became homeless when Mugabe's Drive Out The Trash operation bulldozed their tin houses. Mugabe's new 25-bedroom mansion is in a gated suburb close to the mansions of his top ministers and military allies.

Mugabe's closest allies have become rich. during his 27 years in office Mugabe won his cronies loyalty by granting them huge bonuses, in 2000, he allowed figures in his ruling party, ZANU-PF, to seize five thousand of the nation's best farmland from white commercial farmers without compensation and redistributed them to his political allies. He just gave 1,000 chinese tractors to members of his ruling party's central committee but they don't know how to farm so the agricultural system collapsed. (less info)