Shy No More

"He came to me [in the presidential typing pool] and started asking about my family. He just started talking to me, asking me about my life. Were you married before, things like that … I didn’t know it was leading somewhere. I was quite a shy person, very shy."
"I felt a bit uncomfortable when he proposed to me since he was still married to Sally (Mugabe's wife, suffering from terminal cancer]."
"I was very young when I started living with President Mugabe. But he was patient with me and took time to groom me into the woman that I am now."
Grace Mugabe, Zimbabwe 'first lady'

South African rights campaigners say it would be a disgrace to grant diplomatic immunity to Grace Mugabe. Photograph: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP

Grace Mugabe might have started out shy, but it didn't take too long for her to become assertive and materially entitled. While Zimbabweans suffered a plunging value in currency, rising unemployment, scarcity of food and rampant inflation, she amused herself, travelling to Paris to shop, earning herself the uncomplimentary title of "Gucci Grace". Famously, another beautiful and wilful first lady, Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, was known in a much earlier generation for her profligate spending on shoes, and Grace Mugabe doubtless has come a close second, with her own estimated 3,000 pairs.

During one infamous shopping trip to Paris she is reputed to have spent 75,000 pounds, consolidating her reputation as an avaricious woman plundering her nation's scarce financial resources while her countrymen and women suffered privation in a country once considered the breadbasket of Africa. Her husband's scheme of forcefully reclaiming large tracts of land from white Zimbabwean farmers and doling them out to his political government henchmen, members of his family and his supporters destroyed agriculture in Zimbabwe.

Trips to Paris to spend her nation's financial resources are now out. As is her conniving to become the ruling successor to her 92-year-old husband. At age 52, Grace Mugabe will have to start all over again, somewhere else, with the aid of the funds she has squirrelled away since her parade has been rained upon, her schemes overturned, her husband under house arrest. South Africa has offered her haven, but it is rumoured that she has since departed to preserve her life, to Namibia.

Grace Mugabe, wife of Robert, was known as Zimbabwe's 'First Shopper'  Reuters

She does have an enemy who is guaranteed to look for revenge. The Vice-President, a long-time supporter and colleague of her husband's whom she persuaded Robert Mugabe to re-think his fitness to replace him, offering herself as a more suitable and appropriate candidate to become president, as a fait accompli by executive order. Mugabe had, indeed, a week ago informed his ZANU-PF party of his intentions and urged them to support Grace Mugabe as vice-president to replace Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom he had dismissed from his post and his successor last week.

"No one will remove the president except God", Grace Mugabe said at a cabinet meeting days ago. She had also said on a previous occasion that when Mugabe died he would be propped up and would remain president of Zimbabwe even dead. But at age 52 she felt herself to have been sufficiently schooled by him and mature enough in her political wisdom to take his place. The place that Mnangagwa was assumed to have been groomed for. A man whose sobriquet is "the Crocodile". Evidently, the man earned that name and the reputation accompanying it.

He is said to be more ruthless than Mugabe, and more cruel. During Mugabe's 37 years of dictatorship, Mnangagwa served as his spy chief, his chief of defence, and situation enforcer in the early years. Doubtless during the land-seizure campaign beginning in 2000 when white Zimbabwean farmers, skilled in ensuring that the land they farmed was productive, and employing black Zimbabweans who are now though knowledgeable, unemployed, his heavy hand was involved.

But a feud had developed between Grace Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa, and during a ZANU-PF rally she urged her husband to agree that "the snake must be hit on the head". When he was fired, Mnangagwa seeing the writing on the wall as his chief lieutenants were also removed, fled the country, leaving Grace Mugabe to celebrate her victory, and since her husband is old, ill and feeble, her near-ascension to power.

It is assumed that the military chiefs became alarmed at the purge of Mnangagwa's faction, that it would spread to affect their high command. With Mnangagwa orchestrating things from exile in South Africa, a coup was concocted, skilfully and thoroughly, and to great effect, with no blood spilled, the people assured that their president and his family would be safe, that only the corrupt would be arrested.

A military convoy began the proceedings at midnight on Tuesday, launching a surprise assault on the barracks of the presidential guard while other units moved securing vital installations in government districts, to surround parliament, government offices and the studios of state television. Cabinet allies of the president's wife were swiftly hunted down and apprehended, spoken of by General Constantino Chiwenga, as criminals, threats to Zimbabwe.

Finally, liberated from the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe and his ambitious wife, Zimbabweans can breathe a sigh of relief. At least for a brief moment or two. But another, sinister threat of a totalitarian-thug-in-waiting preparing to ascend to the height of power in the country is close on the horizon.

The couple was married in 1996  Getty Images