Poor little rich boys
The Mugabe brothers are no strangers to controversy, writes Peta Thornycroft Grace is accumulator with style
IN MANY ways the Mugabe sons, Robert jr, 25, and Chatunga Bellarmine Mugabe, 21, deserve some sympathy as they are children of superrich parents – President Robert and Grace Mugabe – who are broadly disliked in their home town, Harare.
Most people in the Zimbabwean capital and in other urban areas support the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
The Mugabe boys, now young men, grew up protected from the public in many ways and they were always surrounded by security.
The births of Robert jr and his older sister Bona, born when their father was married to his first wife Sally, were kept secret until Bona started school.
Bellarmine Chatunga was born after their parents married following the death of Zimbabwe’s original first lady, Sally Mugabe, who had been hurt by her husband’s infidelity with Grace. Sally and Robert Mugabe’s young son died of malaria in Ghana, while Robertwas in detention in the former Rhodesia.
The Mugabe sons were also isolated because they were were always with security and grew up in Zimbabwe’s never-ending financial and political crises.
Their parents have few visitors, few friends. And Harare is a dull town. There isn’t much night life, or diversions, and although they followed football and went to official events with their parents, and had all the gadgets in the world, they did not have much fun with people of their own age.
And the Mugabes would insist their children study in South Africa or overseas as Zimbabwe’s shabby tertiary institutions lack facilities and do not have a good academic reputation.
They are, after all, sons of the only leader Zimbabwe has ever known. Many Zimbabweans are frightened of him and are increasingly poor and short of foreign currency for imports and 90% of the population have no jobs. But the Mugabe sons are proud of their parents as they say on their Facebook pages.
People who have spent time in the Mugabe’s massive private family home in the Borrowdale suburb say Mugabe explains to his family, as he does to his people, that all of Zimbabwe’s problems are caused by the West or droughts.
Neither of the Mugabe boys did well academically, and Robert jr was given a tough time by other pupils in the rural Catholic school his father attended nearly 70 years earlier.
One former Zanu-pf insider said Robert jr – or Tino as he is sometimes called – left the school because he was bullied for being Mugabe’s son. He was sent to a top private Harare school, St John’s, for his A-levels.
A teacher says he was polite, modest and tried not to be noticed. He also ensured that his security guards kept a low profile, far from playing fields and classrooms.
Although he failed all his examinations, he became a superb basketball player.
Grace Mugabe once implied that sanctions prevented him from furthering his sports career in the US. Yet the children of about 90 who are on the US “prohibited” list were not stopped from travelling there.
Chatunga Bellarmine had a similar upbringing but was sent to Catholic schools in Harare from the beginning and did not do well either.
But he was not polite and modest like his older brother, and was expelled from St George’s when he was 16, for bad behaviour.
It is not clear whether his subsequent home schooling produced any results.
On Facebook, Chatunga has hordes of friends and he diplays many pictures of himself wearing top-of-the-range clothes in Sandton Square.
Chatunga, according to those who have seen the brothers together, is more outgoing than Robert jr and protective of him, and always has a great deal of money on him.
The Mugabe sons arrived in Johannesburg early this year after a hurried departure from Dubai, where they had been living in a mansion rented at about R500 000 a month.
Mugabe chartered an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767 and rushed to Dubai to pick up his sons so they could leave the United Arab Emirates in a hurry and without incident.
The family has not denied press reports that their sudden departure was connected to alcohol or drugs.
Both sons were supposed to be studying in the Uae.robert jr transferred his studies to the University of Johannesburg, where he is reportedly studying design.
It is not clear where or what Chatunga is studying, or if he is studying. He is said to always have cash for expensive imported liquor on their many visits to the swish Taboo nightclub in Sandton.
Last month the brothers were kicked out of their R70 000-a-month flat after a drunken brawl. Grace Mugabe came to Johannesburg in a hurry to get the flat repaired.
They were then supposed to be living in her huge rented property in Sandhurst.
But without their mother’s knowledge they had rented two apartments in a Sandton hotel, for which they had so far paid about R60 000.
It was here that Grace Mugabe arrived last Sunday and allegedly attacked 20-yearold model Gabriella Engels, who had met Chatunga only the day before at the Taboo nightclub. – Independent Foreign Service GRACE Mugabe is stylish – with her clothes, her homes, and even her businesses.
Zimbabwe’s 52-year-old first lady may speak crudely, but she sure manages accumulation with style.
People meeting her for the first time, especially those with money or influence, find her charming. And they are not wrong. She is charming. At a level.
But she has an insatiable appetite for property and is building an empire for her children, and for herself, for the days after President Robert Mugabe, 93, dies.
Some believe no other person owns or occupies more farmland in sub- Saharan Africa than Grace Mugabe.
But her accumulation is also quite stylish. Compared with her colleagues in the ruling Zanu-pf party, she has good taste in the buildings she creates.
There is little evidence of crude opulence in what she designs, compared with the poorly constructed concrete mansions built by her colleagues.
Many of these excruciating, mountainous houses in posh Harare suburbs are unfinished as the owner-builders regularly run out of cash.
That is not Grace Mugabe’s world. She always has money, and last year completed a gorgeous, well-proportioned, three-storey house atop a koppie surrounded by forests of indigenous trees.
She is neat, tidy and ensures her staff are always well dressed, always.
She has taken (or stolen, as some would say) so many farms and built two schools for the elite, and an orphanage and a dairy. A wildlife conservancy is coming soon. And then work will start on the first Robert Mugabe legacy project, a university to add to the clutch of hopeless universities in Zimbabwe from which thousands of students emerge each year with worthless qualifications.
No one is sure how much land Grace Mugabe has taken, without payment, from white farmers and from a blackowned company, nor how many urban properties she has bought in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Born in Benoni, Grace has come a long way from when she was a young mother, married to an air force pilot, working as a typist at the gracious, modest, Dutch-gabled State House in central Harare.
Mugabe, whose first wife Sally was seriously ill for many years, fell for the extraordinarily pretty and beautifully turned out Grace.
She quickly abandoned her husband, kept their son, got divorced and eventually married Mugabe after Sally died. And then State House, which had housed the British and then the Rhodesians, became too small for Grace. And so the Mugabe mansion emerged in the northern suburbs, built in the early 2000s at a cost of about R130 million.
It is a beautiful pile with landscaped, elegant gardens with wildlife and pretty dams on several levels. The property belongs to Mugabe but is financed by the state and staffed by scores of civil servants.
Many say a good dollop of Grace’s style and flavour was learnt from former model Kiki Divaris, who became her friend and adviser.
Divaris, an immigrant from Greece, married into a family closely involved with the former Rhodesian Front of Ian Smith.
She had been friends with Sally Mugabe and the friendship carried over to Grace.
Divaris produced the Miss Zimbabwe competition for years. Kiki would brook no complaint about Grace, who in turn remained loyal to Kiki until she died and saw to it that her friend had a semistate funeral.
Grace kept a fairly low-profile life as her children were growing up, creating ever more brightly coloured, largely home-made outfits with which she dazzled people when she accompanied her husband to parliament.
And she shopped a lot. When the EU banned her from Europe, she moved that lust to the malls of the old Yugoslavia, then Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Dubai.
Grace was listening, watching, and improving her English and eventually three years ago she was awarded a phoney PHD which she acquired two months after she registered at the University of Zimbabwe.
Then she manipulated her way into becoming boss of the Zanu-pf women’s league. She loves the podium and the microphone. Waving and shouting in Shona and English, she is often crude, and sometimes talks sense about political personalities. Her audiences are mesmerised, and in awe of her.
Grace borrows regularly from Zimbabwe’s largest bank, the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe, and there are jokes in Harare about the size of the Mugabe overdraft. It is apparently enormous, about R500m, some say.
The Mugabes don’t answer questions from journalists about the family’s astonishing wealth.
But little of it comes directly from Mugabe’s modestly paid job, nor the familyowned dairy and other farms. What about diamonds, people say. What about deals involving platinum? Fuel deals? Black-market money deals? No one seems to know and the taxman doesn’t bother Mrs Mugabe.
And the central bank has always helped her.
Her power soared when she choreographed a series of rallies where she ranted and raved about Vice-president Joice Mujuru, accusing her of plotting a coup d’etat.
Within months Mujuru lost her job; she was expelled from the party in 2014.
That is the job Grace now wants – vice-president of Zanu-pf. She says she will push Mugabe around in a wheelbarrow if he can’t walk any more. And, watch this space, she will if she has to.
And she is apparently the money behind various plots to oust Vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was in hospital in Johannesburg this week with a stomach upset which many Zimbabweans quickly speculated came from poison. – Independent Foreign Service