While he may have lost his appetite for dabbling with sinister weapons and rubbing shoulders with politically colourful characters, Libya’s Colonel Moammar Gadaffi has not lost his penchant for keeping everyone guessing.
This weekend he will have at least three balls in the air: the Western powers, whom he has been sweetening up for some months; African leaders for whom he has tried to play the generous uncle-figure; and his compatriots for whom he remains firmly and expressly the ”Brother Leader”. Not a dictator, or even a president, he insists disingenuously, more a simple adviser.
The United States and Britain are in high dudgeon about the candid admission by Libya’s Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem that the compensation agreed upon for the victims of two airline bombings (one American, one French) was not an admission of guilt but merely a means of buying an end to the trouble they had caused Libya.
”We feel that we bought peace. After the [United Nations] sanctions and after the problems we faced because of the sanctions, the loss of money, we thought it was easier for us to buy peace and this is why we agreed on compensation,” Ghanem told the BBC.
While he was about it Ghanem backtracked on the official acknowledgement of guilt for the 1984 slaying of a policewoman by an official firing from the Libyan embassy in London.
US President George W Bush responded swiftly by delaying the lifting of a travel ban on Libya imposed after the 1988 Lockerbie bombing incident.
Just where this leaves Gadaffi, who recently flung open the gates to UN nuclear weapons inspectors and vowed to end his programme of developing weapons of mass destruction, is unclear.
The real possibility exists that the man who has evolved over 34 years of absolute rule into arguably the most idiosyncratic leader in the world has a prime minister even flakier than he is.
Gadaffi is having his African counterparts round this weekend for a special summit of the African Union that he boasts is his brainchild.
Most of the 34 leaders expected to stoop into his tent outside his coastal hometown of Sirte are there to humour him.
Agreeing at least to entertain discussion about Gadaffi’s more fanciful dreams for his continent was the only way of stopping the Brother Leader from hijacking the AU summits in Durban and Maputo.
This time, the leaders are due to discuss a single African army. Gadaffi says such a continent-wide military arrangement will cut defence budgets by two-thirds or more.
But if the most highly developed regional organisation in the world, the European Union, is not even contemplating a single army what chance does Africa have of achieving this?
Diplomats in Tripoli say Gadaffi himself is backing off the notion of an African army in favour of striking non-aggression pacts with the powers that matter.
In fact, there is a growing belief that Gadaffi, who has a notoriously short attention span, might be moving away from his African identity in favour of becoming a Mediterranean.
Gadaffi quit the Arab world in disgust at what he saw as its softening stance on Israel. He moved aggressively into Africa, bankrolling poorer countries to secure their votes in the Organisation of African Unity.
In recent years, however, he has scrapped his ministry for Africa and sacked the ironically named African minister Ali Treki.
But this is another aspect of keeping them all guessing.
Libya remains locked in a contest with South Africa and Egypt to host the Pan African Parliament. The irony of having a country without an elected assembly of its own hosting the continent’s Parliament is apparently lost on the man.
African leaders have other races to discuss this weekend. The 15 places on the African Peace and Security Council are all up for grabs — and here, too, South Africa has thrown its hat in the ring. Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria and Sudan are vying for the seat of the African Court of Justice.
There will be a lot more to go around as the institutions develop. So far only Togo has offered to house the financial institutions.
Which leaves the Libyans guessing what next. As citizens of the country with the world’s third-largest oil reserves, should they still be struggling to make ends meet?
Has the Brother Leader — or ”The Colonel”, as more of his compatriots angrily refer to him in interviews with an increasingly interested international media — realised that his hold on power grows more tenuous?
Gadaffi’s response to Ghanem’s indiscretion will indicate whether the prime minister has a better grasp of the Tripoli street than his leader. If he wants to maintain his new friendship with London, Paris and Washington, he is obliged to repudiate his premier.
If he does not dare do this, however, it will be clear that the hold the Brother Leader insists he never had is actually slipping.