All the news is bad – shut your mind and heart to it or it will surely drive you mad

It is not just Supa Mandiwanzira, our IT minister, comparing 92-year-old Mr Mugabe to a matured whisky of the highest quality.

No-one wants a 5-year-old whisky, good whisky gets better with age, “it’s tasty, it gives us wisdom,” he says. Fine whisky has been called the water of wisdom, but, of course, 99 percent of our people can’t afford it. What a facile thing for the young Supa, who is half the Old Man’s age, to say.

Psychology Maziwisa, a spokesman for Mr Mugabe’s party and yes, that is his real name, needs his head examined. He says the party manifesto never promised to create 2 million “formal jobs” but exceeded its hopes by creating nearly 3 million informal jobs – vendors etc. and even people to do the laundry.

Mr Mugabe presents $1 million dollars to the African Union as a gift; he had originally promised a donation of 300 cattle from his farm. But no, everyone rallied round and gave “thousands” of cows to raise the full $1 million, says our foreign minister at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. Then the folly is revealed: provincial officials of Mugabe’s ZANU PF party inadvertently admit the $1 million came from a Treasury loan and they have been asked raise donations, even in cattle, to pay it back.

As if Donald Trump, Brexit, Mrs May, ISIS and wars all over the world are not intrusive enough, we have Mr Mugabe paying millions of dollars for a bit more globe trotting – including luxury medical treatment in Singapore – while our government hospitals have run out of basic drugs, saline and chemo drips and so on. Children are dropping out of school every day for non payment of fees – the worst long term cost of economic ruin amid the Mugabe government’s mismanagement, profligacy and extravagance.

The good people at the news organisation Reuters have helpfully provided us with this graphic to illustrate Mr  Mugabe’s more recent wanderlust.