Harare - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said on Wednesday that he was in good health, and denied suggestions in the Internet-based media that he had left the country at the weekend to seek medical treatment.State television said Mugabe returned home after a three-day private visit to Malaysia to join his wife, who had accompanied a group of local students to a university there. Zimbabwe Television showed a jovial-looking Mugabe bounding down the steps of a plane at Harare International Airport. Asked to comment on speculation that he was ill, Mugabe said: "Tell them I am dead. I am now a ghost that has come back!"
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The health of Mugabe, one of Africa's longest-serving leaders, has been the subject of constant local and foreign media speculation over the past decade or so. He has dismissed talk that it is failing. Last year Mugabe's spokesperson denied rumours the veteran leader had succumbed to heart failure, describing him as "fit as a teenager".
Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, is presiding over an economic meltdown critics blame on his misrule, but which he says has resulted from a sabotage campaign by local and foreign opponents of his seizure of white-owned commercial farms for blacks.
Thank you Robert. Good news is always so comforting.