And Zimbabwe's real tragedy may yet be to come. There are three scenarios for Zimbabwe's future, and not one of them is happy.

The first and most likely scenario is that Mugabe's loyalists in the security services try to keep him in power, using guns and clubs and the kinds of intimidation that have driven a country that used to be Africa's breadbasket into economic collapse.

This thuggery has been Mugabe's hallmark since 1982, when he roused his own majority Mashona tribe against the minority Matabele of the south in the infamous Gukurahundi operation (it means "wind that blows away the chaff before the rains").

The purpose was to crush the tribal and political movement behind his rival, Joshua Nkomo, who had alongside Mugabe led the liberation struggle against white-ruled Rhodesia. With the support and training of North Korea's military, more than 10,000 of Nkomo's suspected supporters were killed, mainly in the Matabele lands. Since then, politics has been largely a Mashona affair in what seemed until the latest elections to have become an authoritarian one-party state.

The second scenario is that the security chiefs find their own troops, whose families are suffering along with everyone else in the country under an inflation rate that has hit 100,000 percent, will not follow orders. Worse still would be if some do and some don't, causing the police and military to start fighting among themselves and adding a civil war to Zimbabwe's nightmare.

Some military leaders and powerful figures have been distancing themselves from Mugabe and siding with the third candidate, Mugabe's former Finance Minister Simba Makoni. Among them is retired army Gen. Solomon Mujuru, whose wife, Joyce Mujuru, is one of Zimbabwe's two vice presidents.

The third scenario is that Mugabe realizes that the game is up, and he retires to South Africa with his cronies and whatever loot has been accumulated. Then opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who seems to have won the weekend election comfortably, takes over a disaster and tries to fix a broken country.

Doubtless some foreign aid will be forthcoming for humanitarian supplies in a country where life expectancy has dwindled to a mere 35 years.

But the one sweeping reform that might work, bringing back the skilled white farmers who turned Zimbabwe into a major food exporter, is politically impossible. It would mean pushing Zimbabwean families off the land that they have come to think of once more as their own, even though their crop yields have collapsed to pitiful levels.

There is a deeper tragedy here. The mess in Zimbabwe follows Kenya's disputed election last December and the ethnic violence that killed at least 1,200 people and forced some 300,000 others to flee their homes. Zimbabwe and Kenya between them have torpedoed the growing hopes that sub-Saharan Africa was finally turning the corner and embarking on rapid and sustained economic growth.

The latest U.N. Economic Commission for Africa report notes that Africa's economies grew an average 5.8 percent in 2007, the fourth year in a row of solid growth, and it projected growth at more than 6 percent in 2008 thanks to the boom in commodity prices.

Sharply increased foreign investment from China, India and the Middle East and rising demand for African oil and raw materials held out the promise of self-sustaining growth. The continent has seen a boom in mobile phones, new private airlines, tourism and construction as the new money poured in.

But the disaster that overtook Kenya and the latest troubles in Zimbabwe threaten to undermine the growth story. Africa's economic revival was never strongly based. The U.N. report noted that the growth had failed to trickle down to the poor, that inflation was rising ominously and that some countries would be badly hit by rising fuel prices.

"Despite high growth rates in recent years, this strong performance has not translated into meaningful gains in terms of social development," the report said. "Even countries that benefited from debt relief saw debt climbing again, which means that debt relief by itself is not a long-term solution to the sustainability of debt."

According to the report's lead author, Leone Ndikumana, "What Africa needs is better access to non-debt-generating resources, grants, private capital flows and better allocation of resources to productive activities." He went on to warn that despite the surge in trade with Asia and the Middle East, the easy money of the new investment could lead to another debt trap for Africa.

That would be a problem that many Zimbabweans would like to have, after the 28 years of Mugabe's misrule and economic mismanagement. The statistics of the country's decline almost beggar belief. According to the World Food Program 83 percent of Zimbabweans live on less than $2 per day and 45 percent of them are malnourished.

The private economy has collapsed. The IMF says the gross domestic product has shrunk each year since 2000. It fell more than 10 percent in 2003, by another 5 percent last year and more again this year, when it fell 10.4 percent. Meanwhile, government spending as a percentage of GDP soared from 20.7 percent in 2002 to more than 66 percent this year.

Zimbabwe has been a horror story, a hideous example of what not to do to an African economy, and it will take a great deal of aid and capital and hard work to repair, just at a time when the United States is skipping into recession and Western financial markets are in deep trouble. Even if the happiest scenario unfolds and Mugabe steps down quietly, there will be no quick fix for Zimbabwe.

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