After the death of his first wife, Sally, seventy-two-year-old Robert Mugabe married his ex-secretary Grace, forty-one years his junior. There was no one who could gently stop him, with a gentle tug on the sleeve, signaling "no" to his wildest ideas. Homemade afternoon teas on the porch with tea and sweet cream are over. The princess entered the scene and felt that she was entitled to whatever she wished.
Grace Mugabe's marriage to the president in 1996 was dubbed the "wedding of the century" by state-controlled newspapers. Six thousand guests from all over the world came to Harare, including Nelson Mandela. It wasn't long before the First Lady began to use her position.
Milky Baroness
Even before the wedding, Mugabe himself traveled the country looking for land for his future wife, who has now joined the inspection. She made her first purchase from a willing seller. But that wasn't enough for her. Grace wanted the country's largest dairy farm and its white owner was forced to resign by brutal threat. He got paid, but it was only a fraction of the market price. Grace Mugabe then began to play the role of the milk baroness and by taking over other farms, she became the largest dairy producer in the country.
Grace very quickly started to use her position
Foreign customers showed up, but they had to pay in cash to avoid a scandal caused by overt dealings with either of the Mugabe spouses, as both were subject to international sanctions. The couple recently owned twelve farms, but Grace wanted more, confirmed by the servant governors. "There is no longer enough land for all the projects the First Lady has up her sleeve," said Martin Dinha, Governor of Mashaland Central. - Some might say she is greedy [...] but we think she deserves more land.
At the same time, the first lady was famous for her compulsive shopping abroad and needed a place to store long rows of shoes and Gucci handbags. When she got bored of her first palace, called Gracelands, she sold it to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan leader has used several businesses in Zimbabwe to launder money, hiding part of his two-hundred-billion-dollar fortune in them. He bought Gracelands in 2002 and many people assumed he wanted to take refuge there during the Libyan Civil War. Mugabe would undoubtedly offer him asylum . He had previously adopted the Ethiopian tyrant Mengistu Hajle Mariam, who fled his country in 1991 and still lives on a farm near Harare.
"Navy Blue Roof"
After Gracelands was handed over to the Libyan people (now the Libyan embassy is located there), Grace Mugabe began building a mansion "under a navy blue roof" in the green suburb of Harare, Borrowdale. The name of the palace comes from the characteristic color of the tile, reminiscent of the night sky. That's all the passers-by could see, because the rest of the great building was hidden. There were no photos. Always avoiding company, Mugabe rarely invited visitors. It was rumored to be a property worth $ 10 million with two lakes, swimming pools, floor tubs carved in Italian marble, guarding the gates with Chinese bronze dragons, and an elaborate system of gas detectors located along the perimeter of a 25-hectare site in the event of a chemical weapon attack.
Robert Mugabe, October 19, 1979
Questions about the origins of the funding for this seemed to cause Mugabe more trouble than those about the Matabeleland massacres. Apparently he found it hard to come to terms with the idea that the "navy blue roof" might be inconsistent with his socialist rhetoric. However, there were young officials who came up with a suitable story. "The navy blue roof - they explained - was paid for by donations from wealthy supporters and the funds of ZANU-PF in recognition of its long service." Even if that were true, it was all in one basket. The "rich minions" are the guys Mugabe rewarded with illegal income from three sources of plunder:land grabbing, mining in Congo, and the diamond fields in Marange. When the presidential couple was furnishing a "palace under a navy blue roof" with French antiques, the rest of the country was experiencing the worst financial crisis in African history.
Banknotes in barrows
At the beginning of 2008, the Zimbabwean annual inflation rate was 100 580.16 percent. Now let's look at the Mabvuk suburb, 17 kilometers from the center of Harare, in a close-up view:neat, sheet metal houses, two rooms per family, gardens - some with lawn - carports, asphalt roads. There is running water and electricity, although both have just been temporarily turned off. The debris from the barbershop partially blocks the main street, this is the result of the intervention of cleaning teams, which, on Mugabe's order, punish companies operating without permission in this way. A teacher is standing at the bus stop, his hand covering his mouth with dirt pouring out onto the street. Damn it, you have to be careful. Avoiding rubbish and excrement, he jumps on the bus. He's got used to it now.
The amount of his earnings seems to be an astronomical sum, as he amounts to as much as 400 million Zimbabwe dollars annually, but this is hardly enough for weekly expenses. He has just received his March salary and needs to find a currency trader, preferably one that offers US dollars. On the way to town, he passes the marketplace. Panic people buy corn and flour, load them with bags into vans. The wife asked him to buy bread, but it turns out that the loaf costs $ 10 million Zimbabwe. He tries to negotiate, watched by a group of middle-class men who wait for the occasion like a bunch of thugs. If he does, they will rush and try to buy whatever is on the stall to sell for an immediate profit. Everyone speculates on food.
Robert Mugabe (2015)
He finds a currency dealer in the local bank - the director himself, who handles illegal transactions next to the official ones. This time, however, nothing was left. Customers brought entire bundles of banknotes in wheelbarrows to get a few dollars for them. The teacher gives up and goes home.
By the time it gets to the bus stop, prices for bus tickets will quadruple. He cannot afford such an expense, so he goes on foot. Worthless bills fly down the streets with the wind. In the old days, he might have stopped for a beer, but now the bottle costs $ 120 million Zimbabwe. Printing houses cannot keep up with the production of money. After the last denomination, a Zimbabwean $ 100 trillion note was issued, which is only US $ 30.
Even stock factories surrendered at the end of 2008. Inflation was 89 percent with twenty-three zeros. What would be a better time for a presidential election?
Morgan Tsvangirai had a black right eye and a deep cut on the side of his head. Fifty members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) rode with him on the shaking platform of the truck, singing songs of protest against the Mugabe regime. The women had bruises on their legs. The men lay in bloody rags, some half-conscious. As the truck pulled to a stop in front of the Harare courthouse, the line of wounded and beaten people slowly moved towards the entrance. Tsvangirai walked behind, staggering on his feet. These were the accused. They were charged with the offense of participating in a political assembly.
In fact, it was a prayer meeting that Mugabe's police disrupted when they entered with firearms and iron bars. The president later explained that his officers had been attacked and were simply defending themselves, but he could not prove that any of them had suffered any injuries when one of the participants was shot dead.
This was nothing new to Tsvangirai. He has already been accused of treason three times and regularly beaten. One day, several men burst into his office, hit him on the head with an iron bar and tried to throw him out of the window. While attacks on his supporters, including torture and murder, were the order of the day, for most of 2007, Tsvangirai endeavored to make the MDC an efficient organization.
How to win the election?
The presidential election was scheduled for March 2008, and the fight looked to be more even than ever since independence. The problem of the incumbent president was hyperinflation. Mugabe had long since linked ZANU-PF's finances to the state coffers, which meant paying his electoral machinations through public taxes. But now, despite the diamond cash flow in Marange, his party was almost as poor as the MDC. After twenty-eight years of presidency with a sluggish economy and eighty percent unemployment, even Mugabe's private election polls showed the lowest support in the history of his rule. He wasn't going to get beaten by something as annoying as the public, however.
A recruitment campaign was organized to provide ZANU-PF supporters with public service functions. No qualifications were required as no work was expected. These were "ghost stations" that existed only on paper. This practice was practiced on a large scale and systematically. Of the 188,000 civil servants, the commission of inquiry later found out 75,273 are so-called ghosts. Almost half of the Zimbabwean state apparatus was made up of dead souls.
Mugabe's next step was to deprive refugees from Zimbabwe of their right to vote. In most countries, emigrant voting has little influence on the outcome of national elections, but the hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters who fled to government harassment is a factor that could play a decisive role. Three million Zimbabwean citizens lived abroad, almost a quarter of the population. It seemed obvious that most of them were in favor of the MDC.
Morgan Tsvangirai leader of the opposition (2009)
Then there was the question of food. Zimbabwe was doomed to receive food aid, mainly from Great Britain. Distribution was led by the government. In other words, it was up to ZANU-PF to decide who the deliveries would go to. In the months leading up to the election, pressure came from his own advisers on Tsvangirai to boycott the vote in protest against the fraud and violence that the campaign was sure to trigger. Their arguments sounded reasonable. No one other than himself could win in any of the elections under Mugabe. But this time the leader had extremely weak support, and there had never been such a great chance to defeat him. Tsvangirai decided after thinking that the fight should continue.
Election day has come, and it is terribly hot and hopeful. There were fewer than normal incidents of violence, but the lines at many government-organized polling stations moved relentlessly. Until noon hours, they hardly moved. In the garrison cities where ZANU-PF dominated, the election procedure seemed much more effective. Until the evening, when polling stations were closed, everyone who intended to do so voted. In non-garrison cities, hundreds of thousands of volunteers were dismissed with nothing.
It took three days for the Electoral Commission to start announcing the results, starting with the parliamentary elections held on the same date. The messages were dosed for forty-eight hours, as if not daring to list them all at once. There were good reasons for that. The MDC secretary general, who compiled his party's results, calculated that Tsvangirai had gained a clear advantage and reported this to the press. He was immediately accused of treason.
The Election Commission fell silent. For three weeks, the guess was that Mugabe must have received less than the fifty percent of the votes required for a full win and is now frantically considering his next move. Perhaps even Tsvangirai had won an unconditional victory. Still with no results, a wave of violence has started.
In the villages, MDC supporters were attacked and murdered, and their houses were burned. Thousands fled the provinces to find refuge with friends in the cities. A group was setting up a camp at MDC's Harare site. It was soon destroyed.
The police raided the offices of the MDC and the only NGO to conduct its own analysis of the distribution of votes. Computers were smashed, hard drives destroyed, and with them any evidence that could contradict the findings of the Election Commission. On May 2, five weeks after the vote, people turned on the receivers to know the result. Crowds gathered in front of public TV sets in roadside bars, villagers crouched on the ground around battery-operated radios.
The winner was Morgan Tsvangirai. However, he did not cross the 50 percent barrier that would have secured him the presidency. With a result of 47.9 percent for Tsvangirai and a humiliating 43.2 percent for Mugabe, a second round of the election was announced.
Unprecedented violence
The outbreak of violence that followed was unprecedented in the election campaign. Hundreds of ZANU-PF youth raided schools, teachers were forced to lie on the floor, and their buttocks were whipped. White families, known as "British puppets", have been harassed. An elderly couple was forced to leave the farm within two minutes. The bandits kicked the man in the head and his wife beat her unconscious. In the villages, young people from ZANU-PF committed brutal antics, systematically raping women who were considered MDC supporters in front of terrified families. Tens of thousands of people fled their homes. Even if the fugitives had dared to vote, they would not have been admitted because they were homeless and had no identity papers.
There was not even the appearance of a civilized campaign. "We hope that every Zimbabwean will not only vote but vote for Robert Mugabe," said the leader of the military veterans. - People should know that no voice is a secret anymore, but that responsibility rests in the hands of everyone under the threat of death.
To spare his voters' lives, Morgan Tsvangirai decided that he had no choice but to withdraw. Mugabe won without a competitor.
The helicopter lowered its flight, raising a sandy cloud. People fell to the ground and shielded their faces from orange dust. It was the early morning of October 27, 2008, six months after the announcement of the election results. Thousands of half-naked diggers bustled in the Marange diamond fields. People thought the helicopter signaled the arrival of wealthy buyers, agents representing a minister, or foreign businessmen. Some were just underground, in shallow tunnels, when machine gun fire was opened. The miners scattered in all directions. More helicopters flew over the mountains, their crews firing blindly. Over 800 soldiers supported them from the ground. Every time someone was hit, they searched their pockets for diamonds and continued firing.
Emmerson "The Crocodile" Mnangagwa
In the elections, with Mugabe's fate hanging in the balance, only the army stood between him and the rebellious people. His position had never been so threatened and now he was rewarding the military for their loyalty.
The soldiers took over the diamond fields. They replaced police syndicates with their own and toured Marange to make sure the frontline successors had a chance of making a profit. Instead of sharing diamonds with those who mined them, they introduced a forced labor system. They beat and even shot the reluctant. With time, the soldiers found out that it was easier to deal with children than with adults. So they kidnapped and forced several hundred minors to dig diamonds. As the schools in this area had been closed for a long time, teachers were also put to work.
Most of the illicit distribution system remained in the same hands, Mugabe's faithful allies earned the most profits, and diamonds were smuggled into the United Arab Emirates, India, Israel, Congo, and South Africa in violation of the KPCS. In addition, there was a system of legal mining projects carried out by international concerns which they acquired the exploitation rights at auctions organized by the Zimbabwean authorities. Like it or not, most of them finally agreed to cooperate with companies led by ZANU-PF.
No other than in Congo, senior officers held the key and most lucrative positions in the mining industry. Their business was driven by a trading company called the Zimbabwe Defense Industry (ZDI), which, however, no longer cooperated with Kinshasa. Mugabe turned to China now. Money, personnel, and equipment flowed into Marange from Shanghai, and untold millions of carats were sent in the opposite direction.
The most desirable position in the country was that of the guardian of Marange, which fell under the responsibility of the Mining Minister. Obert Mpofu, who held this office, grew immeasurably and suspiciously rich overnight. He could not explain how he had managed to buy the Ascot racetrack and the Bulawayo casino, the Victoria Falls safaris, the farms and commercial premises, the press publisher, and even the bank out of a ministerial salary. He soon became one of the top five landowners in Zimbabwe and began to call himself King of Matabeleland.
It is estimated that the value of the diamonds stolen during the period when Mpofu was the minister was 2 billion US dollars. This does not include lost mining income in the form of taxes and other charges. Robert Mugabe himself estimated it at US $ 13 billion, which is Zimbabwe's equivalent of Gross National Income.
The "navy blue roofs" gleamed against the cloudless sky above Harare. It was March 1, 2014, one month after Mugabe's ninetieth birthday, as he was welcoming guests to his home for the lavish wedding ceremony of Bona's only daughter. Huge white silk tents have been set up between the pagodas and terraces. The guests arrived in bulletproof Rolls-Royce and Mercedes. Mugabe stood proudly, sipping his tea - he rarely drank alcohol - and stroking the lapels of his jacket. There was no sign of any weakness as he shook hands and posed for pictures against a backdrop of silvered trees adorned with purple orchids. The relevant services ensured that all telephones were turned off and no photos of the property were released.
Succession?
After thirty-four years of plunder and ruthless ethnic cleansing, Mugabe's resources to finance "navy blue roofs" remain a sore subject. "You may recall," prompted one of the president's advisers to the few journalists at the entrance, that the land on which the house was built was bought by the ZANU-PF party for its leader, not a cent was spent from the state treasury. " Nobody cared. Outside the boundaries of the great Chinese-style home, the average salary was less than when Mugabe rose to power - US $ 50 a month. A well-known international think-tank recently announced that it takes 190 years for wages in Zimbabwe to match wages in other African countries.
The line of VIPs waiting for Mugabe to shake hands was long. One of the first to stand in the row was a bespectacled pensioner, impeccably dressed in a steel suit and a lilac tie. He shook Mugabe's hand with a firm movement and turned towards the camera with a half smile. They had both been in power from about the same time. It was the African dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema, president of Equatorial Guinea, who usually surrounded himself with armed guards. The Obiang family murdered several thousand more people than Mugabe, and his thefts of state resources were of a different magnitude as well, though it was oil, not diamonds. He nodded regally to the host of the party and allowed himself to be escorted by his assistant.
The article is an excerpt from the book Land of dictators. About the people who stole Africa Publishing House of the Jagiellonian University
It was approached by billions of businessmen, mining magnates, heads of state of the Congo and Ghana. Somewhere in the silk tent was Mugabe's heir.
Emmerson "Crocodile" Mnangagwa, Mugabe's chief strategist during the diamond plunder operation in Congo, and his most loyal ally have arrived. The former intelligence chief had a serious, unreadable expression and seemed uncomfortable at the party. It was Mnangagwa who ensured Mugabe's bloody victory over Morgan Tsvangirai in the 2008 election, for which, he told friends, Mugabe had promised him the presidency when he retired himself.
Beside her was a radiant Grace Mugabe sitting on a white leather sofa. She, too, had a promise. The ninety-year-old husband told her that he would rule from beyond the grave, giving all instructions through her. It was her - he assured - he would like to see in the role of president, which one of his opponents described as a "coup under the marriage certificate".
They exchanged greetings with Mnangagwa as siblings, not rivals, and offered each other sandwiches and champagne. But they both knew that the power struggle to come would be between them and no one else. Mnangagwa could rely on influential war veterans and army commanders during the liberation wars. Grace could count on the support of the new elite in the business world, but only thanks to bribes paid by her husband. Mnangagwa waited and followed the rules of the game. Shortly after the wedding, he was appointed vice president. He still needed Mugabe's kindness. But only for a while.
In November 2017, Mugabe miscalculated and made a fatal mistake. He dismissed Mnangagwa to open the way for Grace to succession. Mnangagwa and his allies were just waiting for it.
At ninety-three, Robert Mugabe suddenly became a prisoner in "dark blue roofs," surrounded by troops loyal to Mnangagwa. The old man could not choose a successor, as if he did not believe in his own mortality. Mnangagwa waited long enough…
The article is an excerpt from the book Land of dictators. About the people who stole Africa Publishing House of the Jagiellonian University