President Robert Mugabe reacted angrily to media reports quoted Botswana President Ian Khama saying Botswana would not respond to President Robert Mugabe, due to his advanced age, after the veteran leader attacked Khama, accusing him of failing to support his country’s foreign affairs minister for the African Union Commission.
As recent as last week , Khama mocked Mugabe on social media Facebook after the withdrawal of his WHO Goodwill ambassador role .
President Mugabe reacted immediately telling Khama, who is still a bachelor at 66, to mind his own business and concentrate on finding a wife to marry.
“Instead of spending his time peeping into a married neighbour’s bedroom, the “boy” should instead try to convince even a single-eyed widow to marry him so that we can take him at least half seriously… as things are like now, he has nothing to tell us,” Mugabe told Chiefs at a meeting recently .
“He talks like a bastard gay gangster and if he continued behaving like that, very soon we will start treating him like one,” President Mugabe said.
Reuters quoted Khama saying President Mugabe should step aside without delay and allow new leadership of a country whose political and economic implosion since 2000 is dragging down the whole of southern Africa. “They (Zimbabweans) have got plenty of people there who have got good leadership qualities who could take over,” Khama, the UK-born son of Botswana’s first president, Seretse Khama, and his British wife, Ruth, continued.
“It is obvious that at his age and the state Zimbabwe is in, he’s not really able to provide the leadership that could get it out of its predicament,” Khama said, in comments that breach an African diplomatic taboo banning criticism of fellow leaders.
This is not the first time Khama has breached an African diplomatic taboo banning criticism of fellow leaders.
The two leaders have had frosty relations for some time now.
Among SADC leaders, the Botswana leader and the late Zambian leader Levy Mwanawasa have been, over the past few years, the only loud critics of their Zimbabwean counterpart.
-Online
