JOHANNESBURG: When Zimbabwean game farmer Tendai Musasa speaks about his president, Robert Mugabe, his voice softens with joyful pride.

At a giant party in Victoria Falls on Saturday to celebrate Mugabe’s 91st birthday, the 20,000 guests feasted on elephant meat donated by Musasa, who pledged to slaughter two of the beasts.

Mugabe celebrated his 91st birthday with a lavish bash attended by thousands of ruling party faithful. Crowds of supporters clad in ZANU-PF party regalia emblazoned with the president’s image sang and danced as he arrived for the party being held at a luxury hotel in the famed Victoria Falls resort.

Assisted by his wife Grace the frail Zimbabwean leader, who was surrounded by family members, threw 91 balloons into the air.

Elephants were slaughtered for the feast, which was held on the hotel’s golf course, with white marquees erected to accommodate the guests.

Seven huge cakes were on display in one of the tents. One giant 91kg creation depicted the Victoria Falls.

Musasa, whose lifelong dream is to meet Mugabe, said his main motive for donating the elephants, as well as a lion trophy, a crocodile trophy and a small herd of live impala, was gratitude. He’s a beneficiary of Mugabe’s land reform policy, a program that saw white farmers ousted from their holdings without compensation after 2000.

“We regard him as our father,” he said of the world’s oldest leader, who has been in power for 35 years. “Our provider, our hero. We regard him as a very courageous man.”

Musasa originally planned to donate a wild buffalo or two, to be slaughtered for the feast. However, recent rains made it difficult to find any, so he donated five live impala to breed in the president’s game reserve. The lion, which he recently hand-picked, and a crocodile are to be stuffed as trophies, not eaten.

He said there was a strong cultural obligation for Victoria Falls to show hospitality and thank Mugabe for celebrating his birthday in the town.

Others who have donated items include government heavyweights Jonathan Moyo and Obert Mpofu, who each offered 20 cows for slaughter. Mpofu also donated $40,000 (Dh146,920) toward the event, according to local media.

The extravagance of the birthday celebrations has attracted criticism because of the stark contrast with Zimbabwe’s high unemployment and failing businesses. The country’s struggling public enterprises, including electricity and transport providers, are expected to contribute to the event and a teaching union official, Raymond Majongwe, told local media the nation’s threadbare schoolteachers had been forced to donate from $1 to $10 each.

Mugabe’s increasing frailty has ignited a succession war in the ruling ZANU-PF party, with Joice Mujuru ousted as the nation’s vice president last year among accusations of plotting to kill Mugabe. Scores of her allies, including senior party officials and 15 ministers and deputy ministers, were purged in December.

Musasa, director of the 31,000 acres Woodlands Conservancy near Victoria Falls, said it attracts big game trophy hunters from all over the world, including the United States.

He said it was better to kill one elephant for the Mugabe feast than 20 cows. “It’s one life versus 20,” he said.

Musasa, sensitive to criticism from conservationists _ though he doesn’t always agree with them _ added that the elephants would have been shot anyway because they were nuisance animals that were threatening local farmers. He said Zimbabwe was severely overpopulated with elephants.

The elephant shot for the feast Thursday was a young bull.

“It had grown up (with) a tendency of charging and hostility to farmers,” he said. “They’re going to the ripe corn. They become aggressive, stubborn and unflinching in their attacks.

“Elephants have got characters, like human beings. There are the rogue ones who become accustomed to being thieves. They attack people guarding the fields.”

He said the conservancy usually shot about two elephants a year as part of its “problem animal control.”

“We send a message to the rest of them not to be rogue animals. We put down the most formidable charger or aggressor to say to the rest, ‘Don’t do this thing.’”

The lion to be given the president as a trophy would be shot later this year by an international game hunter who would pay a trophy price, he said.

“I personally identified an old lion, a huge one,” he said. “If you have studied the dynamics of the lion kingdom, these lions are soon ousted by the pride. They start to pray on farmers’ livestock. They start to be a danger to human lives.”

Musasa was 4 when Zimbabwe won independence in 1980. At university, studying engineering, he led a students’ movement in favour of land redistribution from white farmers to blacks.

Mugabe’s land seizures were violent and controversial: The program led to a significant decline in agricultural production and undermined related industries, as new black farmers struggled to run their holdings without infrastructure, resources, knowledge, farming experience or access to bank finance.