News of the firing of VP Emmerson Mnangagwa by President Robert Mugabe came in as I was researching and writing this article. The focus of my article was on the rise of Grace Mugabe’s political power riding on the back of her dictator husband, and the case studies I was focusing on were the character and abuse of power by two wives of dictators in Romania and Philippines.
What is now playing out in Zimbabwe with Grace rising to power over the political “corpses” of her perceived opponents but decorated liberation fighters who were close to her dictator husband, is dividing the country and threatening national security.Rightly or wrongly, some are giving dangerous tribal interpretations to what is happening now. Wars have been fought on perceptions and interpretations, and those in political leadership have a moral and national responsibility to practice caution and emotional sensitivity in what they do or say.
As I will show, where wives of dictators capture power, they end up more dictatorial than their dictator husbands. They become intoxicated and entrapped by the very power that they sought in the first place.
However, if history is anything to go by, things never end well, for them, nor their husbands, or the country at large.
Grace’s rise to power
In just three years since her appointment to the position of Secretary of ZANU PF Women’s League in 2014, Grace Mugabe has risen to political power in Zimbabwe, and is only a month away from the Vice Presidency, which will put her within arm’s reach of the Presidency of Zimbabwe. The Munhu wese Kuna Amai might find its way into the national anthem.
This rise has been meteoric and would be phenomenal if it was deserved. But it wasn’t and it isn’t.
Her rise has everything to do with her being the wife of the all too powerful long-serving President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. No merit, no history, no background, no character, no checklist, on her scorecard to justify her ambitions for the highest office in the land. other than sharing the bed with the President. Her right has been sexually transmitted (perhaps transfused is more appropriate) through her marital relationship with the President.
Jabulani Sibanda, we should have listened to you.
If this is meant to be a joke, I don’t see the funny side of it. Unfortunately, it is real.
The entire nation of Zimbabwe, educated and enlightened as we are, are totally arrested and transfixed on the rail tracks while this train blinds us with its headlights and is coming to crush us.
The confluence of dictatorship and ambition
The rise to power of the wives of dictators is the result of a confluence of two factors or elements whose presence and mixture tends to produce the political toxicity we are faced with today in Zimbabwe.
The first is the presence of dictatorship of the Presidency, and second is the crass and manipulative love of power and the good things in life in the First lady. Spice these two elements with old age on the part of the dictator, and you have the makings of a political atomic bomb.
Dictatorship alone is not the problem. Mugabe has always been a dictator, but none of what we see now happened when he was married to Sally, and for sure nothing like this would be happening if she was still our First Lady. Neither would the ambitions of a First lady alone result in what we see now in the absence of a dictator or the presence of one who does not allow this to happen. The two elements have to come together.
The Historical Anecdotes of Ferdinand Marcos and Nicolae Ceausescu
Two cases where such confluence can be anecdotal to what is unfolding in Zimbabwe at the moment are the cases of Imelda Marcos, wife of Philippines Dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines with an iron fist from 1965 to 1986, and Elena Ceausescu, wife of Nicolae Ceausescu, who was the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989.
Both dictators were later deposed. Marcos died in exile in Hawaii, while Nicolae and his wife were shot on Christmas Eve in December 1989 as part of the revolution against communism and dictatorship.in Europe.
It is the story of their wives that is the focus, and how this should send a chill down the spine of every Zimbabwean, as you can see our First lady Grace Mugabe through the character and behaviour of these two women. Grace exhibits characteristics similar to theirs.
Imelda Marcos and Grace:
Ferdinand Marcos was the President of Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He crushed opposition, detained critics, and was responsible for the assassination of his main political opponent Benigno Aquino in 1983, an event which sparked a revolution that threw him out of power into political exile.
In 1963, the then Senator Ferdinand Marcos, married Imelda Marcos. Imelda was beautiful, charming, charismatic and well educated. She used this charm to campaign for her husband to become President. It is said when Marcos met Imelda, he was smitten by her beauty and he chased after her for a whole week asking for her hand in marriage.
During Ferdinand Marcos’s Presidency, Imelda Marcos became very powerful politically, that she was responsible for some( if not most) of the horrors and excesses of the Marcos regime.
President Mugabe married Grace Mugabe in 1996, and at that time she was a mere typist in the President’s office. Just like Ferdinand Marcos, Mugabe was smitten by Grace’s beauty, but unlike Ferdinand and Imelda, both Mugabe and Grace were both married when they started having an illicit affair. At that time, Mugabe’s wife Sally was suffering from a kidney problem.
Unlike Imelda, Grace married Mugabe when he had been power for 16 years, first as Prime Minister then President. She did not help him acquire power; she helped him abuse it.
Grace, Imelda and the love of the good things in Life:
Grace is known for her love of the good things in life. She loves foreign travel and shopping expensively, earning herself the nickname Gucci Grace, or the First Shopper. It is widely felt that the endless foreign trips by the President are at the behest of Grace to provide her occasions for some shopping. Otherwise, how can one explain his attendance at unimportant conferences where he is embarrassingly the only Head of State? And how come during the time Sally was First Lady, the President never travelled abroad as much as he does now?
The 52-year-old First Lady has a penchant for designer shoes and clothes, and before western sanctions were slammed against the First Family, Grace’s shopping cities of choice were London and Paris. At one time she spent a whopping USD 120 000 on shopping in Paris during a brief visit. At the moment she is in the courts with a Lebanese businessman over a botched deal to buy a diamond ring from Dubai about US$1.3million she claims was a wedding anniversary from her husband. This deal exposed Grace’s lavish lifestyle. Were it not for the fact that the deal went sour, the world would not know the extent of her caprices.
This story comes when the country has a shortage of foreign currency and externalization of funds is a criminal offence. The economy is suffering on account of lack of foreign exchange.
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