This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 11, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

In Zimbabwe, rising deaths from cholera have once again raised the alarm about the devastation

reeked by the Mugabe regime, but what stands as the greatest threat to Robert Mugabe's

power?

Marion Tupi, a policy analyst of the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

There has always been criticism of Robert Mugabe emanating from Western countries, Britain, the United States and so on.

Certainly ever since he embarked on his disastrous policy of expropriating the commercial farmers that has led to the

country's economic collapse but we are finally seeing a critical comments critical

comments critical attitudes emanating from Africa as well.

It is regrettable that for almost a decade most African countries simply regret

simply did not criticize Mugabe and that has begun to change in recent years, but certainly since the outbreak of cholera,

which killed by now approximately 600 people and infected another 16,000 the

African voices for the end of Mugabe's rule have certainly become louder.

In all the criticism that we're seeing, Kofi Annan says that Mugabe has failed to bring his

country out of this crisis, there's so little focus on all of the specific actions that he took to plunge his

country into the crisis that it's in.

Obviously, Coffey and Ann and the group of elders as they are

known have been instrumental to putting Zimbabwe back in the news because I

think that there was a bit of a fatigue with regard to Zimbabwe stories in the last few months.

And he and Coffey Annan and Grassa Michelle, they really brought the world's attention back to the

humanitarian crisis which is destroying Zimbabwe. You are absolutely right that this hopefully final chapter in Mugabe's rule was preceded for almost a decade by an ever-increasing an ever increasing strangulation of the economy and of the political

sphere in Zimbabwe and basically what we have been seeing is that as Mugabe became increasingly economically

...