President Robert Mugabe on Wednesday took a dig at his in-laws' country, Ghana.

The 90-year-old leader said Ghana is in the same undeveloped state it was when he met his wife Sally in the 1960s.

“I have been to Ghana 1958 to 1960 and when you look at them now and compare their present situation to that [which] existed in the 1960s, no change.

“There might be more people. Yes. There may be one road from the airport, which has been well done so that people who visit the country think everything is ok,” he said.

Mugabe also ascribed the festering Ebola pandemic on the Continent – mostly in Sierra Leone and Guinea – to their colonial ties with France.

He said it showed that Europe did not have Africa’s interests at heart.

“That’s about all, no change. There are still areas where not all children go to school, big countries and you wonder why? It’s because they have remained under the control of countries like France, European countries like that,” he said.

He said most French colonies had remained dependent on their former colonisers due to the agreements they signed when they attained independence and had no control over their natural resources.

“So those countries are not free. What is now very important but an absolutely discouraging development is that the leaders we get now are not of the same calibre as vana (Kwame) Nkrumah, vana Seko Toure, vana Modibo Keita, vana (Abdel) Nasser, no. They are all ‘yes leaders’ because they expect help, money from European countries,” he said.