Increasing speculation in southern Africa suggests the diplomatic efforts of South Africa, Nigeria, and Malawi, whose leaders have been applying pressure to Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, may yet bear fruit. If they do result in the "voluntary" retirement of the 79-year-old President after 23 years in power, the opposition Daily News reported on Friday, a multinational aid package may then be forthcoming from the international community to help the famine-ravaged country.
It could not come a day too soon. Mr Mugabe's brutal and ill-judged land reform has plunged nearly two-thirds of the country's 11.6 million people into hunger and left a million agricultural workers jobless. Of the country's 4,400 commercial farms at the start of the drive to expel white landowners, only some 1,000 are now believed to be working viably. And most of the 342,000 landless families settled on the land have been unable to farm because of lack of seeds, machines and skills.
Mr Mugabe's rigged re-election last year - its corruption attested to by the Commonwealth - has been sustained only through the brutal suppression of oppositionists. The Movement for Democratic Change, led by Mr Morgan Tsvangirai, alleges that 600 of its supporters have been tortured in police custody this year. At least four MDC members of parliament say police have used electric probes on them and independent doctors have confirmed injuries consistent with their accounts.
Such methods have been accompanied by attempts to muzzle the local and international press, although earlier this month the Supreme Court ruled an important element of the regime's press law unconstitutional. The court found that a provision criminalising the publication of "falsehoods" should at least require proof of intent.The court's brave, independent stand is a welcome, if temporary, relief for Zimbabwe's beleaguered journalists.
The same reasoning a year ago was used by the courts to overturn an attempt then to expel the Guardian's correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, the last international correspondent still working in the country. On Friday, however, the American journalist, who has written regularly for The Irish Times and has covered Zimbabwe for 23 years, was declared a "prohibited immigrant" and bundled out of the country despite another court order declaring the expulsion illegal.
It is, they say, darkest before the dawn. The authorities' open defiance of the vestiges of the rule of law is a sign of desperation, a final card from a regime whose sell-by date has passed.