Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, is 89 years old, but he is running for another five-year term in the elections on Wednesday.
Perhaps his optimism is justified, given that his mother died at 100, but why is he doing it?
More importantly, why is the ruling party, Zanu-PF, still backing him as its presidential candidate, given that he has spent the past decade as an international pariah?
He is doing it because, although he is an intelligent man, he has convinced himself that it is only his presidency that forestalls an imperialist reconquest of Zimbabwe.
And Zanu-PF is backing him because a) it thinks he can win the election, more or less; b) it believes the international community will grudgingly accept that result; and c) it will then control the succession when he finally dies.
Mr Mugabe was always a despot, but his history as leader of the independence movement meant that he probably did win honest majorities in the elections during his first two decades in power.
He only went off the rails completely when constitutional amendments that would have let him run for two more presidential terms were rejected in a referendum in 2000.
That was when Mr Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms and handing them out to his own cronies, with the result that Zimbabwe's agricultural production dropped by half. The country's economy virtually collapsed, jobs melted away even in the cities, and runaway inflation completed the country's ruin.
Mr Mugabe's election campaigns have always been accompanied by tight controls on the media, blatant manipulation of the voting process, and a great deal of violence and intimidation.
He almost certainly wouldn't win an election that is ''free and fair'' this month - but as long as there is less violence this time, the rest of the world will accept his re-election as ''credible''.
When Zanu-PF's vote-rigging and intimidation were at their most outrageous, a lot of countries felt they had no option but to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe.
But some of those sanctions affect ordinary Zimbabweans too, so no foreign government wants to maintain them any longer than absolutely necessary. And the emergence of a legitimate political opposition that is going to lose the forthcoming election will give them the excuse to stop.
The opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change, emerged in response to Mr Mugabe's increasingly violent repression. Despite all the usual vote-rigging and intimidation it managed to win a one-seat parliamentary majority in the 2008 elections.
Moreover, the MDC's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, got more votes for the presidency than Mr Mugabe, although not enough to win in the first round.
Zanu-PF and its allies in the army and police went into overdrive, killing or ''disappearing'' hundreds of MDC members, and Mr Tsvangirai pulled out of the second round of the election.
At that point, the Southern African Development Community intervened and negotiated a ''power-sharing'' government in which Mr Mugabe remained president but Mr Tsvangirai became prime minister. Ironically, that has worked to Mr Mugabe's advantage.
Mr Tsvangirai and his colleagues, given responsibility for the economy and social services, have pulled the country back from the brink. Switching to the US dollar ended the runaway inflation and there is food in the shops again, although poverty is still omnipresent.
But Mr Tsvangirai and his colleagues have also enthusiastically filled their own pockets with public money.
Mr Tsvangirai now takes holidays in London and Monaco, and lives in a $3 million home. Many people believe that he and the other MDC ministers have been co-opted by Mr Mugabe's people, and they will not vote for him again.
So Zanu-PF now thinks that (with the help of the usual manipulation and intimidation, but minimal amounts of actual violence) it can not only win the election, but get the rest of the world to accept Mr Mugabe's victory.
Can he do it? Reliable opinion polls are scarce in Zimbabwe, but one conducted by Freedom House last year showed that Zanu-PF had overtaken the MDC in popular support. If Mr Mugabe wins, everybody will acknowledge his victory and wait to see who is appointed vice-president - because that is the person who will be the president of Zimbabwe before long.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
