Herein lies a lesson for the likes of Robert Mugabe and other would-be tramplers on democracy. On Tuesday, the people of the eastern Caribbean island of Grenada, which is a member of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), decided to send packing the administration of Prime Minister Keith Mitchell, which was seeking a fourth consecutive term in office.

Dr Mitchell's New National Party (NNP) won three of the Parliament's 15 seats. In the previous Parliament the NNP had enjoyed a one-seat majority over the National Democratic Congress, which is led by Tillman Thomas, a local attorney.

Smooth transference

It is significant that there has been in Grenada a smooth transference of power, in accordance with the constitution and laws of the country, which is generally what happens in Caricom, whose members, as their leaders told Mr Mugabe in a statement issued at their summit last week, are "steeped ... in the democratic process". Indeed, no fewer than four Caricom states have had peaceful and constitutional transference of political power within the last year.

Grenada, however, provides an added twist to this lesson of democracy; a declaration of sorts about a people's preference, given the opportunity, to freely choose their government via the ballot box.

Indeed, just around the same time that Mr Mugabe was emerging from the bush, at the end of a guerrilla war to overthrow a white minority government, a group of left-wing political adventurers were staging a coup against an incompetent administration, with a buffoon of a prime minister whose priority for the world was the research of unidentified flying objects.

Within three years, the leaders of the New Jewel Movement (NJM), the coup-makers who had developed a habit of jailing dissenters, were killing off each other - and their followers. Then there was a US invasion of the country.

Orderly democracy

Since that adventure, though, Grenada has settled back into being an orderly democracy. It has held at least five general elections since then, displaying a level of maturity that belies the trauma of its troubled past. The country, for most of the past five years - has remained stable despite the razor-thin majority of the government. Moreover, the new prime minister, Mr Thomas, leads a party, some of whose key personnel were members of the NJM, which threw him in jail during the days of intolerance.

A quarter century on, Grenada's healing may not be complete, but the sores are not raw. And that is worth noting in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe thinks himself capable of bludgeoning democracy.

He may, for a time, undermine a process, but not a people's will. And that, ultimately, is Grenada and the Caribbean's message to their kith and kin in Zimbabwe.