Robert Mugabe, the despot of Zimbabwe, must be growing aware that his neighbours in southern Africa are becoming fed up with him. They are not yet ready to tell him openly that it is time to go, but the writing is clearly on the wall.

Yesterday, in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, the 14 leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), including Mugabe, met in an emergency session to discuss what they euphemistically termed the "prevailing political and security situation" in the region. Read that to mean Mugabe's crackdown on his political opponents, particularly the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai.

Indeed, the day before the summit, Tsvangirai was detained and 10 officials of the MDC arrested, allegedly on suspicion of involvement in bombings in Zimbabwe. Significantly, the detention happened just before Tsvangirai addressed a press conference at the MDC's headquarters in Harare. Earlier in the month, the MDC leader was badly beaten by police, and had to be hospitalised, while leading a demonstration in the Zimbabwe capital.

All this is deepening evidence that at 83, Mugabe, formerly a hero at home and to Africans in the diaspora, has grown old and increasingly unhinged. In the process, his despotism grows worse. And in the cruellest of ironies, he has grown into a grotesque caricature of those he overthrew. Napoleon and Snowball and the rest of the gang from Animal Farm would easily recognise themselves in Robert Mugabe.

The shame is that we all had high hopes for Robert Mugabe, the hero of Zimbabwe's independence war, that defeated Ian Smith's racist, white-minority government. He was, after all, kith and kin; in his victory we assumed in part our own liberation. But Mugabe has betrayed us. But more important, he has betrayed through avarice, greed and a lust for power, the people of Zimbabwe, whom he has brought to ruin. Not only the democracy for which they fought is in ruin, but also the country's ramshackle economy.

Mugabe sought to hide his failures behind racist sentiments, blaming the country's white commercial farmers and supposedly external forces for the plight of the Zimbabwe's black majority. Over two decades he did not deliver on land reform, but caused disaster by the expropriation of white-owned farms, taken over illegally by war veterans, so-called. Britain had failed to deliver on a promise to fund land reform, he ranted.

Now, he has become a fully fledged embarrassment to all of us, and has been so for quite a long time. Unfortunately, his closest and most important neighbour, South Africa, to which over two million undocumented Zimbabweans have fled, tiptoed around the issue, preferring quiet diplomacy to telling the Zimbabwe leader that he was an emperor who had become unclothed, even if he was unaware of that fact.

We would have preferred if the SADC leader had bluntly told Mugabe that it was time to go, making it clear that he should begin a transition ahead of next year's presidential election. Instead, they have appointed South Africa's Thabo Mbeki to facilitate a dialogue between Mugabe and his opponents.

But the message seems clear enough, and the good thing is that Mugabe can't claim that those who delivered it have pink noses.