President Robert Mugabe was Thursday night unanimously endorsed by the governing Zanu PF party as its candidate in next year’s election.

Zanu PF's 2008 Presidential Candidate

Before his endorsement late yesterday, Mugabe had dangled the black economic empowerment carrot before his party faithful in a two-hour key note address to the extraordinary congress, as he appeared to set the tone for the harmonized 2008 poll.

Mugabe told the gathering, that included foreign delegates, among them African National Congress (ANC) representative Cyril Ramaphosa, that the objective of the ruling party was to soldier on with the economic empowerment of the majority of black Zimbabweans by giving them more farm inputs and stakes in the lucrative mining sector.

He said he would do this during the course of 2008 by parceling out majority shareholding of at least 51 % to blacks, whom he said for long had be left out of participating in the main stream economy. Mugabe reminded the party faithful that he gave them land after realizing that prime farms were owned by a handful of white imperialists at the expense of the landless majority.

"So now you must form companies to vie for stakes in the mining sector. But we don’t want you to be fronts or puppets that are controlled by whites but to be the genuine majority shareholders in the mines."

Mugabe asked the more than 10 000 delegates to mobilize people for the polls when they return to their respective provinces, adding that he and Zanu PF needed to overwhelmingly win the harmonized elections to shame British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US President George Bush, among other detractors of his government.

"You must support me if you don’t want to return this land to the imperialists. This is what the British are fighting us for. We must show them that Zimbabwe will not be a colony again through the ballot," he said.

He then went on his favourite pastime of laying in on former British Prime Tony Blair, Brown and Bush. Mugabe said elections would be held in March 2008.

"I want to emphasize this, the elections will be held in March 2008 without fail," said Mugabe." But if there are political parties that are not ready for March 2008 we are not to blame," he said. "We must remain united as a party.

We don’t factionalism and violence as we go to this election. Once we are united we can never be vanquished."

He said the party would in the next few months be official launching its election campaign for the presidential, parliamentary, senate and local government elections.

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