Since all lizards crawl on their stomach, it is difficult to feel which one of them has a belly-ache.

The summit conference of the African Union, which took place in Egypt early this week, did not only expose the naked underbellies of African heads of State, but equally demonstrated that they have no stomach for upholding their own laid down principles.

With the few exceptions of Botswana and Liberia, who made it clear they would no longer stomach the presence of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in their midst, the majority of African leaders at the summit welcomed Mr. Mugabe who arrived the summit barely a few hours after declaring himself winner of a highly controversial election he alone contested.

He even received accolades from his compeer, Omar Bongo of Gabon who described Mugabe as a hero, declaring that the man had just won the presidential election and had been sworn-in and was therefore qualified to be one of them.

The rather perfunctory manner in which African leaders regard their accession to and maintenance of power, irrespective of legality and legitimacy, without respect for fair play and consideration for the feelings of their fellow citizens and the opinion of the international community, all add up to constitute the mentality on which politics of the stomach (bellytics) in predicated.

As long as one can get himself declared the winner and is sworn-in by a handpicked acolyte; that does the trick! The sheer self-centredness of African leaders whose one and only preoccupation is to remain in power till death do us part has now become an entrenched political tradition which makes a mockery of democratic values.

Mr. Mugabe is so very conscious of this mentality that despite the overwhelming evidence that he deployed his arsenal of violence and brutality to scare all his opponents from contesting last weekend's presidential election, he felt no qualms about going to the AU summit where he was sure to be embraced by birds of the same feather.

The man arrived the Egyptian city of Sham-El-Sheikh just in time to clink champagne glasses with the likes of his host Hosni Mubarack (in power since 1981) who is reputed for keeping 15,000 political detainees in a dungeon without hope of a fair trial; Museveni of Uganda (in power for 24 years) who is bent on going in for a 4th term of office; Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, who would be clocking 30 years in power next year; the Zenawis, Dos Santos, the Campaores as well as freshmen like Musa Yar'Adua of Nigeria who emerged last year after fraught elections.

Mugabe must have felt very much at home and certainly did not miss the company of our own right royal president Paul Biya who from all indications is bent on beating all the others at their game as he braces himself for yet another term of office in 2011 after he would have clocked 29 years on the throne with his special brand of advanced democracy.

When I occasionally catch a glimpse of Mugabe on TV, gesticulating vigorously with his fist like a student protester of the late 1960's, I wonder why someone cannot politely remind him to carry his 84 years of age with grace and dignity and leave revolutionary rhetoric where it belongs.

Those who are wont to ascribing Africa's developmental failures to Western interference take so much delight in Mugabe's rabble rousing to the extent that they fail to see where the man himself went wrong. He is very articulate when it comes to denouncing the "dictates" of Western nations, British imperialism, the "colonial stoogery" of his rival Morgan Tsvangirai, but ever since he came to power in 1980, Mr. Mugabe has been unable to conceive and implement a clear and viable programme for the appropriation and redistribution of 80 percent of Zimbabwe's arable lands that were confiscated by white settler farmers since the late 19th century.

He has vacillated between a policy of appropriation with financial compensation and outright nationalisation of white-owned commercial farms without compensation. You can't tell where the man stands, but every now and then, especially when elections are around the corner, he raises the spectre of nationalisation, authorises war veterans (ex-nationalist guerrilla fighters) to invade white-owned farms, sack the proprietors, and assume occupation without the slightest managerial know-how and no financial backing to run commercial farms.

There is no doubt that the restitution of the land was the legitimate raison d'être for the war of independence and no one can deny Zimbabweans their God-given inheritance. But then, what has Mugabe made of the land issue? He has merely used it as a subterfuge to perpetrate his grip on power regardless of the collective plight of his countrymen.

Every time the realities of Zimbabwe are discussed in the international media, it is not uncommon to hear a sycophant dismissing them as the work of western media propaganda aimed at painting Mugabe, the nationalist hero, in Satanic colours. No one is dismissing the existence of western propaganda, neither can we be blind to the massive exodus of Zimbabweans to neighbouring countries especially South Africa and the resultant spate of xenophobia that recently raised its ugly head in that former bastion of apartheid.

No one can remain indifferent to TV footages of acts of physical violence against opposition sympathisers in Zimbabwe, the 1600 percent fabulous rate of inflation; the general insecurity of life and property, the battered face of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai which was self-evident of brutalisation and the mass hunger and famine that have struck the peasantry.

By undermining and making a mockery of the democratic process, African leaders are deliberately sawing the seeds of mass rebellion in the belief that they shall be protected from its attendant hardship when it breaks out. They comfort themselves by the fact that they have the army and police at their beck and call and to hell with everyone who is envious of their divine right to reign.

Their roguish manipulation of power and their rascally abuse of the commonwealth of their nations to gratify their selfish pursuit of aggrandisement, luxury and debauchery is not enviable. It is pitiful.