Grace Mugabe: This is Zimbabwe’s first lady
She is the First Lady of povertystricken Zimbabwe, a former secretary who squanders millions of dollars on diamonds, designer shoes and high living. Yet, as her 93-year-old husband ails, the controversial Grace Mugabe is making a play for power, writes Wi
The sense of gloom is everywhere in Zimbabwe’s down-at-heel capital, Harare. Partly because the street lights don’t work and a fuel shortage keeps cars off the road and even candles are running out. Yet one grand residence is all a-twinkle, with illuminated palms swaying in its tropical gardens and chandeliers glinting off the elegant hostess’ diamonds.
Grace Mugabe, second wife of the country’s 93-year-old President, loves to entertain in the house derisively known as “Graceland” – built at a cost of millions of dollars, set in 16 hectares of grounds and featuring such everyday necessities as a thermostatically controlled chiller cabinet for the First Lady’s favourite Godiva chocolates.
Assorted flatterers and freeloaders have been coming here for years, but recently, a different type of visitor has been passing through Graceland’s guarded gates. With Robert Mugabe ailing and the end of his 37-year rule in sight, Grace, backed by a hard core of supporters, appears to be positioning herself to take over.
Western diplomats, who have watched Zimbabwe’s long, tragic slide from relative prosperity to chaos and impoverishment, warn that such a move would trigger a complete collapse. To pay the wages of its increasingly mutinous army, the regime has recently been reduced to selling elephants to Chinese wildlife parks. By the time Zimbabwe’s hyperinflated currency was finally abolished last year, a beer in a bar cost five trillion of the local dollars.
A shapely former switchboard operator who caught President Mugabe’s eye when she landed a job in his office, Grace, now 51, has no direct experience of government and – say her detractors – no obvious talent for anything beyond spending money. The First Lady’s love of shopping and casual requisitioning of state assets have won her the nickname “DisGrace” among opponents.
Even so, few grasped the scale of her extravagance until a leaked intelligence report surfaced two years ago. It estimated that, in 2014 alone, Mrs Mugabe spent $4 million on luxury goods, including 62 pairs of Salvatore Ferragamo shoes and 33 pairs of Guccis, 12 diamond rings, a $150,000 Rolex watch and $400,000 diamond-encrusted headboard for the marital bed. The papers also claim she spent $60,000 on lingerie – Jean Yu and Strumpet & Pink are her favourite brands. Asked on a previous shopping trip to Paris why she was so keen on Ferragamos, Grace explained, “I have narrow feet and they are the ones
I find most comfortable.”
If the shoes she now aims to fill are those of her husband, the country may be in for even grimmer times. Millions of ordinary Zimbabweans have no shoes at all. Or jobs. Or enough food to eat. Increasingly paranoid in his old age, President Mugabe attributes the continuing crisis to a conspiracy of “imperialist” interests, which do not want to see a black African country succeed. Almost everyone else blames his government’s seizure of thousands of white-owned farms, which has led to the collapse of the agricultural sector.
A country that could once export surpluses of wheat, maize and tobacco is now unable to feed itself, and the confiscated farms – mostly handed out to his family and ruling party stooges – now lie barren and neglected.
Grace owns at least a dozen of the farms. According to a source at the embattled Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union, several have ceased production and she is rarely seen at any of them. Then again, the First
Lady may have more pressing matters to attend to.
The first hint of her political ambitions came two years ago, when she was unexpectedly made head of the women’s wing of the ruling ZANU PF party. From this post, she has steadily expanded her power, appearing at party rallies where loudspeakers play a funky, choral version of Amazing Grace and her standard speech is a call for the “destruction” of her husband’s opponents.
The first to feel her wrath was her main female rival within the party, Joice Mujuru, 61, the revered widow of one of the heroes of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. Grace, says Joice, first began trying to freeze her out of meetings, then badmouthed her to senior party colleagues. Finally, in a public tirade, the First Lady accused her of treason, witchcraft and wearing short skirts, which Grace claimed set a bad example to young girls.
“I have given my life to the struggle,” Joice said later. “And I get this.” Once considered a potential successor to Mugabe – she was Vice-president for 10 years until 2014 – Joice found herself driven out of the party. No one has dared to cross the First Lady since.
“While Grace was just the President’s wife,” says Mary Ndoro, a leading London-based Zimbabwean dissident, “people mainly complained about the money she spent. Now, she is involving herself in politics and when you look at the people around her, it is extremely frightening.”
Most of these people are hardline Mugabe cronies, complicit in the nation’s ruin, who fear for their own future if a more enlightened government takes over. Some Western observers suspect their aim is to manipulate Grace Mugabe into office in the hope of maintaining the status quo. Others believe her hope is to save her own skin.
While the official line is that President Mugabe intends to stand for yet another five-year term in next year’s election, almost no one believes he is up to it. At a recent party congress, he dozed through most of the speeches, waking up only to nibble distractedly from a silver salver of potato chips. Frail and obviously confused, he appeared heavily dependent on his wife, who had to step in with a spade when he was unable to plant a ceremonial sapling.
When, eventually, she ushered him offstage, returning alone to loud applause, the symbolism could scarcely have been more obvious. Just in case anyone missed it, she told a rally later, “They say I want to be President.
Why not?”
Grace was born in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, where her labourer father had gone looking for work. When she was five, the family returned to Zimbabwe – then white-ruled Rhodesia – and settled in a small village
150km south of the capital.
The guerrilla war that would bring her future husband to power was already in progress, although Grace’s family kept their heads down and she’s said to have been traumatised when her school was blown up by rebel forces.
She later took a secretarial course in Harare and while still a teenager married Stanley Goreraza, a trainee Air Force officer. Aged 20, she secured a job at State House, the headquarters of the new majority government led by Robert Mugabe. With Stanley and their young son, she settled into a small flat on the outskirts of the city.
Those who knew Grace at the time describe her as “uncomplicated”, “beautiful” and “a country girl, slightly out of place”. According to Zimbabwean journalist Edinah Masanga, “She had a very seductive presence, long legs, a good figure and a slightly nasal voice that people found attractive.” She wore her hair in braids, dressed smartly and always smiled – especially when the big boss walked by.
When he first set eyes on Grace, Robert had been married for almost 25 years to Sally Hayfron, a former teacher and political activist who had campaigned tirelessly for his release from prison under the old regime. Wildly popular with the public, Sally had suffered ill-health for some years and struggled with the demands of being First Lady.
That the President – particularly one bathed in the glow of moral righteousness – should begin an affair with a much younger employee, who was also married, was a severe embarrassment to his circle. So, it was hushed up and even now the details of how the relationship unfolded are unclear. “Any journalist who tried to report on it,” says Edinah, “was victimised, arrested and tortured.”
In a rare interview in 2013, Grace appeared to claim Sally had accepted the relationship, saying, “I did feel a bit uncomfortable … he told me they had discussed it and she was sort of agreeable. Of course, she knew I was there … so I’m sure they had come to some agreement of some sort.”
Before Sally’s death from kidney failure in 1992, there was a darkly comic interlude when President Mugabe had to shuttle between the maternity ward of Harare’s main hospital, where Grace was giving birth to their daughter, Bona, and the hospice wing, where Sally lay dying. Many of those who once admired him believe he lost his moral bearings when Sally went out of his life.
With the hapless Stanley quickly divorced and dispatched to the Zimbabwean Consulate in China, Grace and the President were married in 1996.
It was easy to dismiss her – as many did – as a trophy wife, satisfying a powerful, older man’s vanity. Grace contributed to this perception by stumbling over big words in the occasional speeches she was required to make, while decked in expensive jewellery and attended by personal stylists.
Accounts of her shopping trips were soon seeping past the government’s censors and with them came allegations of corrupt associations with shady business figures and talk of lavish properties she had acquired in Hong Kong and London.
Yet there were few suggestions that she had any interest in politics. A 2007 US diplomatic cable, published by WikiLeaks, stated, “Grace has few friends, even within the Mugabe family … Grace’s primary personal interest appears to be shopping: she reportedly spends large amounts of foreign exchange on her trips to Asia.” It concluded, “We believe Grace has little or no political influence over her husband.”
Joice Mujuru believed it, too. “I had never thought of her as politically minded,” she ruefully told a British newspaper. “She was just the First Lady. It was a ceremonial role. She always told us she wasn’t interested.”
The change has been swift and ominous. Today, as Zimbabwe counts down the days to the ageing President’s departure, all eyes are firmly on his wife. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has accused her of masterminding a “palace coup” and claimed that she was already in effective control.
If so, the responsibilities of power have done nothing to diminish the First Lady’s taste for luxuries. She is currently embroiled in a bizarre legal dispute with a Harare-based Lebanese diamond dealer, who supplied her with a $2 million ring – supposedly a present from her husband to mark their 20th wedding anniversary.
The dealer, Jamal Ahmed, claims Grace took delivery of the ring, then sent it back, demanding that a full refund be paid into a private bank account in Dubai. Jamal refused, saying he had run up considerable costs in preparing the ring and would risk money-laundering charges if he paid the money into a foreign account.
Grace retaliated, he claims in court papers, “by launching a campaign of terror and harassment against me, where I was threatened, insulted and told she could do anything to me because this was Zimbabwe.”
Three properties he owns were seized and a judge’s order to hand them back has been ignored.
For the average Zimbabwean struggling by on $3 a day, in a country with an 80 per cent unemployment rate and almost no functioning services, the
First Lady’s diamond difficulties feed the fury of the masses.
The exhausted nation has sustained itself for years with the hope that when Robert Mugabe dies, things will get better. Now, the prospect is of another Mugabe taking over and things getting even worse.
“Grace doesn’t know much about politics,” says an old Harare hand from the colonial days. “But she has a pretty good idea of what could happen to her when the old man goes. Let’s say there are a lot of people who are not well-disposed towards her. At some stage, she will have to make up her mind.”
For most of her pampered life, Grace’s idea of a tough decision has been choosing between Tiffany and Cartier, Armani and Valentino. Soon, she must make one that matters. And until she does, the lights will be burning late at Graceland.
They say I want to be President. Why not?