REWIND: The Million Dollar Birthday Bash - President Mugabe celebrates in style [Pics + Video]

The elephant might have been in the room but it was not on the menu, after all, at Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s 91st birthday party at the Elephant Hills hotel in the country’s premier tourist attraction, Victoria Falls, on Saturday.

Although Zanu PF supporter Tendai Musasa, who farms on disputed game land in the area, had promised to shoot a couple of elephant, buffalo, possibly a crocodile and other game for the dinner, none arrived at the hotel in the end.

That might have been because hotel management had said they did not have enough refrigeration for elephant meat.

So good Zimbabwe beef was the main meat on the menu. Plus sadza, the local name for pap. It was raining, but that did not seem to dampen enthusiasm for the party.

All 1060 hotel rooms were booked well before the festivities and the Hospitality Association of Zimbabwe said “a couple of hundred” more rooms in the bed and breakfast lodges and rooms in private houses were also booked.

“This is our low season, when we have the fewest number of tourists, so this birthday party is really good for our businesses,” said Trything Mutyandasvika, chairman of the association.

The dinner began on the hotel’s golf course for 100 children who share a birthday with Mugabe, then moved indoors for a banquet for 500 of those nearest and dearest to the long-serving leader.

Musasa had also promised to shoot a lion and mount it as a present for Mugabe. However, it was not clear before the event if he intended going ahead with this strange gift as he didn’t answer his mobile phone for a few days. But few believed he would have been able to shoot a lion legally on the land he claims near the Falls.

National Parks and Wildlife officials in Harare said they were monitoring the situation and that no one would be allowed to shoot animals for any party without a permit.

It all seemed like just an obsequious Zanu PF supporter going overboard to please Mugabe.

“We had very heavy rain on Friday night, but today it is guti, (mist) and that will be okay, it will be a great festivity,” said a hotel worker at the Falls before the party started.

Mugabe and his young wife Grace arrived at Victoria Falls late Friday.

To get back to that elephant in the room, which is when is Mugabe ever going to get too old for the job? Mugabe did refer to it, obliquely, when he told state media that he, not Grace, was in power in Zimbabwe.

He denied she controlled the politics of Zimbabwe, ever more divided as Zanu PF has been split since the party’s congress last December.

“She is not the power behind my throne,” said Mugabe of his 49-year-old wife. “She has come into politics in her own right.”

Grace Mugabe burst on to the political stage last year by holding a series of rallies last year in which she denounced then vice-president Joyce Mujuru, saying she was greedy for power.

Mujuru was later sacked along with 17 senior Zanu PF members who were her supporters in the Cabinet and senior civil service positions.

Some suspect Mugabe is grooming his wife to succeed him, others that Mujuru’s arch-rival, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who replaced her as vice-president, used Grace to bump Mujuru out of the race to succeed him.

Mugabe said the former national chairman, Simon Khaya Moyo, was also suspected of being a Mujuru supporter – and so the party chairman’s position had been axed and he, Moyo, former long-time Zimbabwe ambassador to South Africa, was slotted into the more junior post of party spokesman.

“I told SK that, no, he was viewed by many as close to Mujuru… so we abolished the chairmanship thing,” he told State journalists.

Zanu PF’s former spokesman, Rugare Gumbo, was sacked, and so too was the party’s administration secretary, Didymus Mutasa.

No one suspected of being close to Mujuru has been invited to the Victoria Falls party, apparently being funded mainly from the presidential budget.

“There has been advance payment for all of this,” said a clerk in the billing department of one hotel at the Falls.

Some pics below:

Watch video below:

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Source: http://www.iol.co.za/