‘Grasping Grace’ Mugabe has long had an eye on top job

Grasping Grace; Zimbabwe’s First Shopper. Mrs Mugabe has attracted no shortage of nicknames and her ambition is no secret.

Grace Mugabe with her husband, with flowers, last week at a ceremony to rename Harare International airport to Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport. Picture: AP

Whether it is Grasping Grace, Gucci Grace or Zimbabwe’s First Shopper, Grace Mugabe has attracted no shortage of nicknames since she caught President Robert Mugabe’s eye almost 30 years ago when she was a young typist assigned to State House.

Once best known for her extravagant international spending sprees and violent outbursts, Mrs Mugabe has made less and less secret her ambition to succeed her husband as president as he has grown older and frailer.

Robert Mugabe kisses his wife during the country's 37th Independence Day celebrations at the National Sports Stadium in Harare in April. Picture: AFP

“They say I want to be president. Why not?” she told a rally in 2014, the year she became head of the ruling Zanu (PF) party’s women’s league. “Am I not a Zimbabwean?”

As Mr Mugabe grew more doddery, falling asleep at public rallies and on one occasion reading the same speech twice, his wife, 52, was increasingly seen as the puppetmaster.

The country’s vice-presidents have been her fiercest rivals. Mrs Mugabe accused one, Joice Mujuru, of witchcraft, and shortly afterwards she was sacked. Last month she denied allegations that she had tried to poison Emmerson Mnanagagwa, Ms Mujuru’s successor. It was his removal last week that triggered this week’s coup.

Mr Mugabe’s brutal 37-year rule came to an end after the Zimbabwean army launched a rapid coup, seizing control of the country and placing the president under house arrest in his mansion.

In the early hours the army surrounded the parliament building and state media headquarters in Harare, declaring on live television that “the military is in charge” amid the sound of gunfire and explosions.

President Jacob Zuma of South Africa spoke on the phone to Mr Mugabe, who confirmed that he was being held under house arrest and that he was safe. Reports that Mrs Mugabe, the president’s wife, had fled to Namibia were denied. It was later confirmed that she remained in Zimbabwe.

Robert and Grace Mugabe at a youth rally in Marondera, Zimbabwe, in June. Picture: AP

Rise of Grace

Mrs and Mrs Mugabe were both married to other people when they met in the late 1980s. The president was then childless because his first son, Michael, had died of cerebral malaria aged three, in 1963.

President Robert Mugabe and new wife Grace on August 17, 1996. The ceremony was attended by 6000 invited guests. Picture: Reuters

“I worked in his office for a long time. I looked at him as a father figure,” Mrs Mugabe said in an interview with South Africa’s state broadcaster SABC in 2013. “I did not think he would look at me and think, ‘I like that girl.’ He just started talking to me, asking me about my life. I didn’t know it was leading to somewhere.”

By the time Mr Mugabe’s first wife, Sally, a Ghanaian, died of kidney disease in 1992, Grace had borne two of their three children. She later admitted their affair felt “a bit uncomfortable”. But she cemented her position as Zimbabwe’s first lady with a wedding in 1996 attended by 40,000 guests, including the former South African president Nelson Mandela. Grace was 31 and her groom 72.

Mr Mugabe described their courtship as a necessity. “Although it might have appeared to some as cruel, I decided to make love to her. She happened to be one of the nearest and she was a divorcee herself. And so it was.”

For Grace it was the latest step up a ladder that would lead to her amassing properties around the world, including dairy farms and diamond mines in Zimbabwe, as well as homes in South Africa and Malaysia.

Robert and Grace Mugabe at his birthday celebrations in Masvingo in February last year. Picture: AP

In 2003 she was alleged to have spent $120,000 on a trip to Paris. National Dis Grace was added to her list of nicknames. More recently she sued a diamond dealer over allegations that he had failed to supply a 100-carat diamond, worth $1.35 million, that she had ordered to mark her wedding anniversary.

Her taste for expensive things appears to have rubbed off on her children. Her youngest son, Chatunga, was condemned last month when he appeared to post a video online showing him pouring a bottle of champagne over a diamond-encrusted Rolex watch in a South African nightclub.

South African media suggested that he had boasted that he bought the £45,000 watch because “Daddy run the whole country”.

It was while visiting her sons in South Africa in August that Mrs Mugabe found herself at the wrong end of an arrest warrant after storming into a hotel room and attacking a model who was with them. Gabriella Engels, 20, said that Mrs Mugabe’s bodyguards just watched as the first lady hit her with an extension cord. Ms Engels filed assault charges but Mrs Mugabe flew home after President Zuma granted her diplomatic immunity.

It wasn’t her first alleged assault. In 2009 she attacked The Times photographer Richard Jones after he tried to take her photograph outside the exclusive Shangri La Hotel in Hong Kong. Witnesses said that bodyguards held Mr Jones against a wall while Mrs Mugabe hit him.

Since then she has coalesced support from a group of politicians known as the G40, or Generation 40, because they are in their forties and fifties, which means they were too young to fight in Zimbabwe’s independence wars.

She tried and failed to get her husband’s endorsement when she urged him in July to name a successor. He has always insisted that it is up to the party, not him.

It was a rare public disagreement, but theirs was like any other marriage, she said in 2013. “He is saying I want this. I am saying I want that. He thinks I am very tough,” she said.

(Jerome Starkey was Africa correspondent of The Times from 2012 to 2016)

The Times

ZIMBABWE TIMELINE

Key dates in Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule, one of the longest on the African continent

From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe

April 18, 1980: Rhodesia gains independence after 90 years as a British colony, taking new name Zimbabwe. The 1972-1979 war of independence between nationalist black people and the minority white regime led by Ian Smith has left 27,000 dead. Robert Mugabe, head of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), takes power as prime minister. Joshua Nkomo, head of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), Mugabe’s partner in the armed struggle, becomes interior minister.

February 17, 1982: Nkomo, accused of plotting a coup, is dismissed. Armed resistance in his stronghold of Matabeleland is met with bloody government repression. At least 20,000 die.

December 30, 1987: Mugabe becomes head of state after reforming the constitution to usher in a presidential regime. Two years later rival movements merge to become the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).

White farms seized

February, 2000: Start of a violent campaign of seizure of white farms by squatters and pro-Mugabe war veterans. More than 4,000 of the 4,500 white farmers are stripped of their land, with the support of the regime, with the official goal of correcting inequalities dating back to the colonial era.

Mugabe hangs on

March 2002: Mugabe is re-elected president in a poll marred by violence and widely denounced as rigged. Western sanctions are imposed.

March, 2008: ZANU-PF is defeated by Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in parliamentary polls. Tsvangirai wins the first-round presidential vote, but withdraws from the second round, citing violence against his supporters. Mugabe is inaugurated for a new term.

August 2013: Mugabe is declared re-elected in July 31 elections with 61 percent of the vote, against Tsvangirai’s 34 per cent. Tsvangirai describes the election as a “huge farce” and “null and void”. The EU, however, starts normalising relations with Zimbabwe, lifting most of its sanctions.

Purge

December 6, 2014: Mugabe names his 49-year-old wife Grace as head of the ruling ZANU-PF party’s women’s wing. He then seeks to quell infighting over his successor by purging his foes.

April 14, 2016: MDC gathers more than 2,000 demonstrators in Harare in the biggest march organised for a decade against Mugabe.

September 24, 2017: Activist pastor Evan Mawarire is arrested after he posts a video bemoaning the country’s worsening economic troubles.

November 6: Mugabe fires Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, long considered his probable successor, who has close ties to the military and the powerful independence war veterans. He flees the country.

November 13: Army chief General Constantino Chiwenga demands a “stop” to purges and warns the military could intervene.

November 14: Several tanks are seen by witnesses moving near Harare.

November 15: Military announces that Mugabe “and his family are safe and sound.” Declares it is only “targeting criminals around him who are committing crimes” and insists this is not a military takeover. Military vehicles block road outside parliament and are deployed near ZANU-PF offices.

AFP