He has ruled - and ruined - Zimbabwe for all of its 37 years since winning independence, a victory for which he claimed much of the credit.
He has been variously described as ‘the lion of Africa’ and ‘a wily old crocodile’, known as ‘Uncle Bob’ to supporters and ‘Mad Bob’ to critics - and he had plenty of both, after seizing unprecedented power but bankrupting his country and brutalising millions.
Mineral-rich Zimbabwe used to be known as ‘the breadbasket of Africa’, prosperous on the back of its diamond and gold mines and expanses of fertile land.
But under Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party it has become one of the world’s poorest - with infrastructure left to rot, schools and hospitals neglected, families left in near-famine conditions and opponents bullied, tortured and murdered.
A cholera epidemic in 2008 killed almost 4,300 people, at a time of economic meltdown when inflation soared as high as 500billion per cent, ransacked supermarkets lay empty and bank queues for the following morning would begin to form each afternoon.
An undercover visit by Metro in December 2008 when foreign journalists were banned found piles of unburied corpses dating back weeks, hospital patients languishing outdoors attached to drips looped around branches, and children obliviously swigging from rubbish-crammed, contaminated streams.
