Geldof: Mugabe on last legs
2008-05-01 11:40
London - Bob Geldof said on Wednesday that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was on his way out but warned that he might try one last brutal attempt to cling on to power.
The rocker-turned-Africa activist insisted the country's electoral crisis was best left for that continent to sort out and slammed the West for doing nothing about him earlier.
"Mugabe is on his last legs. He's going to go," Geldof told the Institute of Directors' annual conference at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
"It may be the last desperate flurries of a dying man that he would thrash out and try and destroy people.
"But frankly, with the electoral commission, we're now seeing the army and the police haemorrhaging and going to the other side. Hopefully things will stabilise beyond that."
Geldof organised the high-profile 1985 Live Aid charity concert to help relieve starvation in Africa and has dedicated much of his life to development on the continent since.
He organised the Live 8 global series of concerts in 2005 to put pressure on Western powers to strike a deal on debt, aid and trade for Africa.
He said the West should not meddle in the fall-out from the March 29 Zimbabwe presidential election, the results of which remain unpublished.
"It should be left to Africa and it is working," the Irishman told the 3 000-strong gathering of British business chiefs.
"Can you imagine 10 years ago an electoral commission in Zimbabwe? The government having said 'Do a recount', they recount and they say 'Sorry, no more seats'?
"It's a measure of the immense progress this continent has made."
He blasted Western leaders for failing to attack Mugabe's regime before the chaos of last month's vote.
But given the record of Western powers on intervening in other countries - notably Iraq - maybe Zimbabwe was best left alone, he said.
"The fact that it wasn't dealt with before was of course shameful," said the 56-year-old.
"Perhaps the time wasn't right. Our interventionist policies elsewhere have prevented us from engaging, perhaps more forcefully in other places.
"As it turned out, maybe that was just for the better."