Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe regards Thabo Mbeki as a "great man" and Jacob Zuma as a "man of the people who likes to make promises without necessarily knowing how to fulfil them".

Details of a "surreal" three-hour meeting in which an "alert, articulate" and "defiant" Mugabe expressed his views to U.S. diplomats are contained in a classified U.S. embassy cable leaked to whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

The previously unreleased cable, obtained exclusively by Media24 Investigations, describes Mugabe as "possibly the healthiest 85-year-old in Zimbabwe", "clearly stuck in the past" and "desperate to re-engage with the world and to be treated as an elder statesman".