HARARE - President Robert Mugabe Mugabe, best known for his anti-West bombast and his controversial agrarian revolution, said he was humbled by the honour and would travel to Ecuador to accept it. The Anglican Church of the Province of Ecuador will confer the award of Doctorate of Civil Law in three weeks time to Mugabe who will be en-route from the UN General Assembly.
The message was delivered by the visiting Bishop of the Ecuador province, Dr Walter Roberto Crespo, at State house in Harare on Saturday. Describing Mugabe as not only a political leader but also a spiritual leader, Crespo said “the conferrement of the honorary doctorate to the Head of State is in honour of and recognition of Mugabe’s outstanding leadership of not only Zimbabwe but of the rest of the world including Latin America”.
Crespo was accompanied by deposed Anglican Bishop Norbert Kunonga and the Bishop of Manicaland Elson Jakazi. Kunonga is a renegade Anglican bishop who has zealously defended the autocratic President. This is the latest in a long list of honorary degrees earned by Mugabe. He holds several honorary degrees and doctorates from international universities, awarded to him in the 1980s; at least three of these have since been revoked.
In June 2007, he became the first international figure ever to be stripped of an honorary degree by a British university, when the University of Edinburgh withdrew the degree awarded to him in 1984.On 12 June 2008, the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees voted to revoke the law degree awarded to Mugabe in 1986; this is the first time one of its honorary degrees has been revoked. Similarly, on 12 September 2008, Michigan State University revoked an honorary law degree that it awarded Mugabe in 1990.
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