Martin Luther King Junior, the slain American civil rights icon, had this to say in 1963, the height of the struggle for freedom by United States civil rights groups:

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

Zimbabwe's long-promised moment of reckoning has finally come.

It beckons all patriotic and valiant citizens to stand up with one voice to tell one Robert Mugabe: Mr President, please go and go now.

The presidential vote on Saturday and Sunday gives all of you, victims of tyranny and madness of two decades, an historic and very last chance to free yourselves from modern history's worst dictatorship and to reclaim your lost sovereignty.