Zim first lady: style but little grace

Grace Mugabe knows what she wants and she’ll go for it no matter what stands in her way

GRACE Mugabe cuts a decidedly stylish figure and this style extends from her clothes to 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 her president husband Robert Mugabe, 93, dies. Some believe no other person owns or occupies more farm land in sub-Saharan Africa than Grace Mugabe.

Compared to 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 has taken, or stolen, as some would say, so many farms and built two schools for the elite, and an orphanage, a dairy, and 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 are jokes in Harare about the size of the Mugabe overdraft. It is apparently enormous, about R500 million, some say.

The Mugabes don’t answer questions from journalists about the family’s astonishing wealth.

But little of it comes directly from Robert Mugabe’s modestly- paid job, nor the family-owned dairy and other farms. What about diamonds? What about deals involving platinum? Fuel deals? Black market money deals? No one seems to know and the tax man 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 and accused her of plotting a coup d’etat. Within months Mujuru lost her job and was then 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 wheel barrow if he can’t walk any more. And watch this space, she will if she has to.

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.

But Grace Mugabe knows her survival depends on Robert Mugabe and so she must ensure whoever succeeds her husband, will also protect her.

If she suspects they might not be able to extend the same protection, this is perhaps why she is splurging tens of millions of rands on properties in Johannesburg.

She would probably admit that she failed to give her sons the kind of childhood they needed. But it must have been hard to grow up as a Mugabe in Harare, a small town with little entertainment, and where most people support the opposition and detest all the Mugabes. Including Grace. No matter how stylish she may be. – Independent Foreign Service

Grace Mugabe