ZIMBABWE'S COUP DE 'GRACE'
Why tanks rolled to chase power-mad Mugabe wife away
M EET the woman whose insatiable appetite for power set in motion Zimbabwe’s ongoing military coup: First Lady Grace Mugabe.
The 52-year-old shopaholic, who has earned the nickname “Gucci Grace” thanks to her taste for designer clothes, allegedly convinced her hubby — dictator “President” Robert Mugabe — to sack his heir apparent, ushering in a military backlash that left the 93-year-old despot under house arrest while she hightailed it out of the African country to parts unknown.
“I say to Mr. Mugabe, you should . . . leave me to take over your post,” the silver-tongued Grace said in a church meeting, according to the The Globe and Mail. “Have no fear. If you want to give me the job, give it to me freely.”
Then, she gave him the not-sosubtle instruction to ax his vice president and right-hand man of 40 years, Emmerson “Crocodile” Mnangagwa — so-named because the beast is his clan’s totem and because his erstwhile political resilience has been likened to the leathery reptile’s skin.
“The snake must be hit on the head,” Grace hissed, referring to Mnangagwa.
Within a few days, Robert delivered a proverbial crocodileskin handbag to spendthrift Grace by ousting longtime ally Mnangagwa. The plot cleared the runway for his fashionista wife’s ascent to leader — until the military intervened Tuesday.
GRACE’S tale is equal parts Imelda Marcos and Lady Macbeth, a profligate first lady who has incurred a struggling nation’s ire while manipulating her powerful husband.
The South African native’s rise began in the early 1990s, when she was a single mother and secretary in Robert’s typing pool.
Robert had recently pivoted from his seven-year role as prime minister into the position of president, which he has held since 1987.
“He just started talking to me, asking me about my life. ‘Were you married before?’ Things like that,” she told South African journalist Dali Tambo in 2013. “I didn’t know it was leading somewhere. I was quite a shy person, very shy.” Robert’s wife at the time, Sally Hayfron, was still dying of kidney failure when the president first bedded Grace — who is 41 years his junior — even though it “appeared to some as cruel,” he said.
“She happened to be one of the nearest and she was a divorcee herself. And so it was,” he told Tambo in the same interview.
In the years since, she has insinuated herself deeper and deeper into politics, executing by 2016 what critic and former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai called a “palace coup.”
Now she is considered next in line for the presidency, a position military allies of Mnangagwa found so detestable that they took the nation’s capital Harare by force this week days and imprisoned Robert in his own home. Critics fear her inauguration would only accelerate decades of mismanagement by her husband.
ROBERT Mugabe took power in 1980 following decades of unrest and ultimately revolution in the former British colony known as Rhodesia.
The freedom fighter had been imprisoned from 1963 to 1975 after refusing at trial to retract his calls for resistance. Upon his release, he led the guerilla campaign to finally end white minority rule in Rhodesia.
In exchange for a cease-fire, the rebels won voting rights for all adults — regardless of skin color, property ownership or income level — and Rhodesia’s first open general election was held in 1979.
Robert assumed the office of prime minister the following year and proclaimed the country was to be renamed Zimbabwe. He was hailed as a national hero and vowed a future of reconciliation and prosperity.
Yet in the three decades since, he has raided his country’s resources, leaving most of his fellow countrymen near starvation while he and his family live in opulence.
He was the country’s prime minister from 1980 to 1987 and has been its president since, maintaining power through intimidation and alleged vote-rigging during the country’s sup-
posedly free elections.
Robert plunged his nation into poverty when, in 2000, he ordered “veterans” of the revolution to strip white farmers of their land and hand it over to lower-skilled black farmers, including Grace, who owns several dairy farms.
The former “breadbasket of the region” has not produced enough of its staple corn to sustain the country since 2001, according to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, the flamboyant first lady allegedly blew $120,000 on a 2002 shopping junket to Paris that got her banned from entering the US and EU member states as punishment for wastrel spending while Zimbabweans back home went hungry.
ASIDE from her exceedingly pricey tastes, she is notorious for her shrewdness and outsize intensity.
In October, she had to publicly deny trying to poison rival Mnangagwa after his claims that an August bout of food poisoning was actually the result of an assassination attempt.
“Whatever the truth of the allegations, when you have the first lady denying that she poisoned the vice president then things have gone pretty far,” one Harare commentator told The Guardian at the time, asking his name be withheld for fear of reprisals.
Grace allegedly savaged South African model Gabriella Engels with an electrical cord in August after she found the hottie partying with her Robert-sired sons, Robert Jr. and Chatunga, in a Johannesburg hotel. “She flipped and just kept beating me with the plug. Over and over,” Engels said at the time. “I had no idea what was going on . . . I needed to crawl out of the room before I could run away.”
Photos showed a gash on Engels’ head that required 14 stitches and bruises on her thigh. Grace, who claimed the “intoxicated and unhinged” stunner lunged at her with a knife, never faced charges because South African officials granted her diplomatic immunity.
Robert reportedly lobbied South African President Jacob Zuma to have the situation “solved amicably,” though Zuma denied any role in the proceedings.
Back in 2009, Grace reportedly chased down British photographer Richard Jones and pummeled him in the face while her bodyguards held his arms behind his back — all because he tried to take a picture of her outside a Hong Kong hotel.
HER blood feud with Mnangagwa goes back at least to 2014, when she signaled her entry into politics by taking over the women’s league in the ruling ZANU-PF political party where they were both members.
At the same time, she raised eyebrows by announcing she had obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Zimbabwe after just three months of enrollment there in what became a national joke.
“I feel sorry for the University of Zimbabwe dragging its name into the mud and trashing its credibility as a place of excellence,” quipped longtime party member Simba Makoni, according to South Africa’s Independent Online news outlet.
Grace’s thesis was never made publicly available.
Her machinations inside the ZANU-PF party also irritated fellow member Gen. Constantino Chiwenga, who now leads the coup against Grace and her husband.
The party was historically composed of heroes from the nation’s bloody struggle for independence, including Mnangagwa and Robert.
So Gen. Chiwenga, also a veteran of the liberation movement, naturally took umbrage when he saw outsider Grace consolidating her support among younger party members who were not part of the historic struggle and who are not closely allied with the group’s military wing.
Tensions hit a fever pitch when Robert fired Mnangagwa last week — a gambit Gen. Chiwenga saw as part of a larger “purging” of party stalwarts in favor of Grace-allied newcomers.
“It is with humility and a heavy heart that we come before you to pronounce the indisputable reality that there is instability in ZANU-PF today and, as a result, anxiety in the country at large,” he said Monday.
“The current purging, clearly targeting members of the party with liberation backgrounds, must stop forthwith,” he continued. “We remain committed to protecting our legacy, and those bent on hijacking the revolution will not be allowed to.”
By Tuesday, military vehicles were rolling through Harare and by Wednesday, the military seized control of state television and detained Mugabe.
“We are only targeting criminals around [Mugabe] who are committing crimes that are causing social and economic suffering in the country in order to bring them to justice,” the army announced as it denied a coup on state-run media.
Mnangagwa ally and ranking ZANU-PF member Chris Mutsvangwa praised Gen. Chiwenga for “a bloodless correction of gross abuse of power.”
South African President Zuma confirmed on Wednesday that Robert is alive and being held in his Zimbabwe home, according to a BBC report.
Grace’s whereabouts, however, are unclear — military officials said they detained her, but ZANU-PF officials have claimed she is no longer in the country.