President Robert Mugabe returned to Harare 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.
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.
Reports about the declining health of Mugabe, who is showing signs of his advancing age, are common, but he likes to describe himself as “fit as a fiddle.”
On Saturday, 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 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.