South Africa’s Pieter Wilhelm Botha, who died on 31 October aged 90, had a comfortable retirement. Having presided over one of the world’s most repressive states, developed nuclear weapons in collaboration with Israel, invaded neighbouring states and helped perpetuate wars in Angola and Mozambique killing hundreds of thousands, die Groot Krokidil resigned in 1989. When he dies seventeen years later, he gets a generous obituary from Nelson Mandela, and President Thabo Mbeki attends his funeral. Their judgement was that prosecuting Botha would have undermined national reconciliation. A decade ago, former US Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker told a conference on Zimbabwe in Washington that President Robert Mugabe should be given a ‘soft landing’. Mugabe, Crocker argued, had been helpful to the USA by granting asylum to Ethiopia’s ousted leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. Today, Crocker’s proposal would be unthinkable in Washington but African politicians have mooted a similar plan to save the country from political conflagration. Yet even as the crisis deepens, no one in the ruling ZANU-PF wants to be first to propose such a plan in public.