Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe denounced the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday evening, calling dependence on the crisis lender and other donors tantamount to economic slavery, reducing African countries to beggars. "We don't have to go to IMF for that, even to any European donor, for what we can do between and amongst ourselves," Mugabe told a business meeting organised in Windhoek by the Namibian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "And when we start doing it on our own, you'll see them coming, saying 'Ah, you have a factory here. We want to assist you.' Then, if we want a partner, the partner must come on our terms, because then we will have the capacity to do things on our own.""When we don't have that capacity, then we are like economic slaves. We go begging. There are still countries in Africa which go begging for money in order to pay their civil servants, and they got independent in the '60s," he said. Citing non-payments of arrears, the IMF has just frozen support for Zimbabwe, which has now reached the world's highest inflation rate at 1 600 per cent annually.