It will take a while yet, but the long and brutal reign of Robert Mugabe in Zim-babwe is probably nearing its end. Not because of the democratic opposition at home, whose members are regularly beaten up and sometimes killed by the regime?s police. Not even because neighbouring countries in southern Africa are at last putting pressure on Mugabe to go. Just because his own partners-in-crime have decided that it?s him or them.

The key moment came last December, when for the first time the senior ranks of the ruling Zanu-PF Party stood up to Mugabe and refused to accept his proposal to postpone the next presidential election from 2008 to 2010. It was typical Mugabe salami tactics ? give me two more years, and maybe I?ll decide to resign in 2010 ? but this time it didn?t work.

All that has followed ? the asaults of opposition leaders by Mugabe?s police in mid-February, the South African government?s decision to start talking to Mu-gabe?s Zanu-PF rivals and Zimbabwean opposition leaders, and the emergency meeting of the leaders of the 14-nation Southern African Development Commu-nity (SADC) in Tanzania on 28 March ? is a response to this new perception that Mugabe doesn?t have long to run.

"I have been to these SADC summits and I know that behind closed doors they are brutally frank," Mugabe?s former information minister, Jonathan Moyo, told "The Guardian" last week. "They will remind Mugabe that he told them he would retire at the end of his term in 2008. They will tell Mugabe that his rule is dragging down the whole southern African region." None of that got into the meeting?s closing communique, which ritually expressed solidarity with Mugabe, but Moyo is probably right, because Zimbabwe is becoming a blight on the region.

Inflation in Zimbabwe, at 1,700 percent, is the highest in the world, and average income is less that a tenth of South Africa?s. Ten years ago Zimbabwe was seen as the bread-basket of Africa, and it earned ample foreign exchange from exports of tobacco and other cash crops ; now it cannot feed half its people, and the tobacco crop is down by four-fifths.

There are an estimated three million Zimbabwean economic refugees in South Africa, and they are the main support of those left at home, because unemployment in Zimbabwe is 80 percent or more. Zimbabwean life expectancy is now the lowest in the world : 37 for men, 34 for women. Then there is the unbridled brutality of the police force, the official con-tempt for the law, the propaganda that blames all the failings of the regime on foreign imperialists plotting against it ? it?s not exactly the image that southern Africans want for their region.

On the whole, southern Africa does not fit that image. Most of the governments in the SADC are democratically elected and law-abiding. Most economies are showing good growth, and nobody is starving. But it is a well-known fact that people in other continents have difficulty in telling one African country from another, and that investors are the most ignorant of all. Zimbabwe?s multiple failures take up more space in the international media than all news about all thirteen other members of the SADC combined, and so the neighbours' patience has run out.

In fact, it ran out some time ago, but being realists about the nature of politics in Mugabe?s Zimbabwe, the other SADC leaders saw no point in publicly demanding change. Now, however, there is blood in the water. Mugabe managed to bully Zanu-PF?s central committee into nominating him for the presidency again on Friday, but everybody knows that two major factions in the party want him to quit. That has opened the door for others to demand change as well.

The ideal outcome would be an alliance between Zanu-PF dissidents and Zimbab-we?s democratic opposition in a transitional government leading to free, internationally supervised elections. The reality may be a good deal messier, because the Old Man doesn?t know how to let go. He has just imported 3,000 "security personnel" from Angola to stiffen his own police, who are deserting in droves and going to work in South Africa as security guards because inflation has made their wages in Zimbabwe almost worthless.

But one way or another, Mugabe?s long misrule has reached the beginning of the end.