Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe returned home late on Friday after a month-long holiday in the Far East, just over a week after the presidency dismissed rumours that Africa’s oldest president had suffered a heart attack and collapsed.
Mr Mugabe, who turns 92 on Feb. 21, is the only leader that the Southern African nation has ever known, and his health is being closely watched in and outside his ruling party, Zanu-PF. The party is deeply divided over who will eventually succeed him.
The president was shown on state television network, ZBC, arriving with his wife Grace and several security aides at Harare Airport, where he was met by one of his vice presidents, Emmerson Mnangagwa, cabinet ministers and security chiefs.
Mr Mugabe did not speak to journalists from ZBC or the state-owned press..
Reports about the declining health of Mr Mugabe, who is showing signs of his advancing age, are common, but he likes to describe himself as “fit as a fiddle.” On Saturday, Mr Mugabe will meet another long-ruling African leader, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who arrived in Zimbabwe on Friday on a three-day official state visit.
In 2014 Mr Mugabe was re-elected to lead Zanu-PF for another five years, automatically making him the party’s presidential candidate in the next general elections, in 2018.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe (born 21 February 1924) is the current President of Zimbabwe, serving since 22 December 1987. As one of the leaders of the rebel groups against white minority rule, he was elected as Prime Minister, head of government, in 1980, and served in that office until 1987, when he became the country’s first executive head of state. He has led the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) since 1975.
Mugabe rose to prominence in the 1960s as the leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) during the conflict against the conservative white-minority government of Rhodesia.