House arrest should not prove too irksome for Robert Mugabe. After all, the house in question is most likely the 25-bedroom mansion in Borrowdale, an affluent suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, built for the now-deposed president and his wife, ‘Gucci Grace’.
A gilded cage, quite literally, in the baroque style, marble-clad, drenched in gold leaf and with two swimming pools and a state-of-the-art security system, it is a study in vulgarity.
This wedding cake of an edifice, built at vast expense, is an opulent rebuke to millions of ordinary Zimbabweans who must daily contend with appalling poverty, struggling by on barely a dollar a day.
If the 93-year-old dictator is permitted to serve out what time remains to him in such a setting, he should be grateful.
Others of his kind ended up swinging from lampposts.
House arrest should not prove too irksome for Robert Mugabe. After all, the house in question is most likely the 25-bedroom mansion in Borrowdale, an affluent suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, built for the now-deposed president and his wife, ‘Gucci Grace’
Robert Mugabe’s wife Grace (pictured together) is said to have fled to Namibia according to an opposition MP, though there has been no official confirmation of her whereabouts.
Robert Mugabe’s wife Grace (pictured together) is said to have fled to Namibia according to an opposition MP, though there has been no official confirmation of her whereabouts.
The £7million custom-built mansion which is Robert Mugabe’s rumoured coastal bolthole
Zimbabwe is under the control of the country’s military after troops, who are holding President Robert Mugabe under house arrest (one of his his homes pictured here), seized the state broadcaster
And 93 is a good age in Zimbabwe — a very good age. When Mugabe came to power in 1980, the life expectancy of a Zimbabwean male at birth was 59. It is now 58.
This is testament to a regime that has transformed what was once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries, endowed with fertile lands and mineral wealth, into an economic basket case where in 2008 the monthly inflation rate peaked at 79.6 billion per cent.
If one object sums up ‘Comrade Bob’ Mugabe’s custodianship of his country, it must surely be the production of the One Trillion Dollar note. The hyperinflation of Weimar Germany appears like a minor glitch in comparison.
Luckily for Mugabe and his wife, there is plenty of hard currency stashed away in family bank accounts in Asia and elsewhere, as well as property in Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia and South Africa.
These billions are the fruits of decades of corruption which have transformed Zimbabwe into a mafia state, a society in which members of the ruling civilian and military elite always expect their cut.
Robert and Grace Mugabe stand comparison with the very worst in the league table of kleptocratic dictatorial couples.
Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, curses of Romania and the Philippines respectively, are among the few who can rival Mugabe and his wife in the obscene scope of their greed and heartlessness.
But even their countrymen were not as poor as the 16 million people of Zimbabwe are now.
In 2015, the UN World Food Programme estimated that a quarter of children under five in the southern African country were stunted due to malnutrition, and just over half were suffering from anaemia.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe claims to be a Roman Catholic.
Schooled by Jesuits, he has attended the canonisation of Popes in the Vatican.
How he has ever been able to square his religion with the monumental lack of compassion displayed during his 37 years in power is one of the enduring mysteries of the man.
Certainly, ‘Gucci Grace’, a woman who at 52 combines a rapacious appetite for luxury goods with a keen sense of self-worth and a violent temper, was not the person to provide her ageing husband with any form of moral guidance.
Mugabe’s first wife, Sally Hayfron, who lay dying from kidney failure even as the president courted his future second wife — she was his secretary — is considered to have been a restraining influence.
Grace, by contrast, displays no facility for restraint, lavishing millions on bling, including, of all things, a diamond-studded headboard. Cost: £200,000.
Mugabe, said to be a frugal man despite his purloined wealth, may not worship money like his wife but he has the Maoist’s disdain for the individual.
After coming to power in 1980 after years of armed struggle against the white-supremacist government of Ian Smith, Mugabe, leader of the Zanu-PF movement, was at first feted by world leaders.
Margaret Thatcher chatted to him by the fireside at No. 10 during his visits to London, she with a whisky, he with water.
Mugabe always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the old colonial master, combining admiration of the British with deep suspicion.
His capacity for ruthlessness would soon become clear.
First Lady: Grace Mugabe, 52, pictured with her husband, has been seen as being a successor to her husband after her opponent was fired
In 1983 his forces began a brutal campaign of repression against the Ndebele people of Matabeleland, in western Zimbabwe, who constituted the main support for Zanu’s liberation struggle rival, Zapu.
This exercise in ethnic cleansing, known as the Gukurahundi, is the darkest episode in Zimbabwe’s post-independence history, involving as many as 20,000 civilian deaths. Mugabe justified this slaughter on grounds that the Ndebele required ‘re-education’.
Mugabe’s campaign against Zimbabwe’s white population was far less bloody but no less vindictive. From 1999, the regime initiated a programme to transfer 4,000 white-owned farms to black owners, mainly supposed veterans of the liberation struggle.
Driven out by beatings and intimidation, farming families joined an exodus that saw the white population fall from 296,000 in 1975 to 29,000 now. Zimbabwe’s once-thriving agricultural sector collapsed, particularly its profitable tobacco-growing industry.
As Mugabe aged, he began to suffer the classic symptoms of the dictator. A refusal to acknowledge the true conditions of his people was combined with increasingly lavish expenditure on family events and political rallies.
Mugabe’s marriage to Grace in 1996, dubbed the ‘Wedding of the Century’ in Zimbabwe, was an extravagant Catholic affair. And each decade of the old dictator’s life was marked with ever more expensive partying — his 90th year being marked by a celebration costing £600,000.
Equally extravagant were the president’s foreign jaunts. Despite an EU travel ban, Mugabe continued to criss-cross the world, tailed by a retinue of between 20 and 30 people. Standard allowance for each of them: £1,500 per day.
Grace, who shares her husband’s humble beginnings, was also doing her bit to transfer Zimbabwe’s slender national wealth abroad.
During one bout of retail therapy in Paris in 2002, the First Lady — known in her homeland as the First Shopper — spent more than £120,000 in department stores. And by 2014 her spending on luxury goods was running at £2 million a year. That year’s shopping list included 12 diamond rings, 62 pairs of Ferragamo shoes, 33 pairs made by Gucci and an £80,000 Rolex watch.
After one trip to London, where she stayed in a suite at Claridge’s, Mrs Mugabe was asked how she could justify spending so much on designer shoes.
Grace, who shares her husband’s humble beginnings, was also doing her bit to transfer Zimbabwe’s slender national wealth abroad
‘I have very narrow feet, so I can only wear Ferragamo,’ came the tear-jerking reply.
The Mugabes were banned from Europe in 2002, depriving Grace of favourite haunts such as Harrods, but she continued to spend in China and the Middle East.
A diamond ring purchased to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary cost her £900,000, although she later sued the dealer in question for failure to deliver.
In a further act of retaliation, the First Lady threatened to seize the businessman’s properties in Zimbabwe — hardly a new tactic for a woman who has managed to ‘purchase’ no fewer than five dairy farms with funds that simply appeared out of nowhere.
The Mugabe offspring have acquired their parents’ taste for the good things in life.
In September, Grace’s son by her first marriage, Russell Goreraza, took delivery of not one but two Rolls-Royce limousines.
The 33-year-old playboy is something of a ‘petrolhead’, owning a fleet of expensive cars that he uses to drive around his bankrupt country.
The Mugabes’ youngest son, Chatunga, is similarly extravagant.
He posted a video on Snapchat showing himself pouring champagne (Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades, price £200 a bottle) over a £45,000 watch on a night out in South Africa. He bragged that he owned the timepiece because ‘daddy runs the whole country’.
Soldiers and an armoured vehicle are pictured on patrol on a street in Harare, Zimbabwe today. The Zimbabwean military appeared to have taken control of state institutions, saying that it was ‘targeting criminals’ in the government
And of course no expense was spared when Mugabe’s only daughter, Bona, married in 2014.
It is estimated that some £3 million was spent on the ceremony, including £500,000 to upgrade the road leading to the venue, a country club. Some 4,000 guests attended.
But do not criticise Mrs Mugabe’s children, to her face at least.
Grace has a fearsome temper, exhibited in Hong Kong in 2009 when she ordered her bodyguard to punch a photographer outside a luxury hotel.
Mrs Mugabe then joined in hitting the hapless journalist in the face with her diamond ring-encrusted fist.
She ‘lost it’ again in August this year, when she assaulted a 20-year-old model called Gabriella Engels with an extension lead in a hotel in Johannesburg.
Only diplomatic immunity, hastily granted by the South African authorities, prevented her being arrested.
But where does the money come from?
One answer is diamonds. Like other members of the ruling clique in Zimbabwe, the Mugabes take their share of proceeds from the Marange diamond fields near the Mozambique border.
The mining operation there is run in co-operation with the Chinese and heavily guarded.
But the estimated £800 billion worth of stones in Marange have so far failed to benefit ordinary Zimbabweans.
If Grace had kept to shoe shopping she might still be enjoying her life as First Lady.
But political ambition got the better of her.
In a bid to succeed her gerontocrat of a husband, in recent years she began selling herself as a political candidate and his rightful heir, angering the political and military establishment, who regarded the succession as their preserve.
‘They say I want to be president. Why not? Am I not a Zimbabwean?’ she told a rally of her supporters.
Sally died in 1992 and Mugabe remarried a woman who would become known as Gucci Grace (right) – hated for many reasons including her luxury lifestyle. In an ironic twist of fate, it is her who is seen as the main threat to her husband as he loses his grip on the nation he has ruled over with an iron fist for 37 years
But she remained deeply unpopular with the population at large.
Her husband’s removal of his likely successor, Emmerson ‘the Crocodile’ Mnangagwa, apparently in favour of his wife, this month was the prompt for military intervention.
In taking on Mnangagwa, a veteran of the liberation struggle and former spy with close ties to the military and intelligence services, Grace was out of her depth, perhaps for the first time in her life.
The price could be a life in exile. Last night it was claimed she had fled to Namibia.
For years, Mrs Mugabe insisted her husband would never cease to be leader of Zimbabwe.
‘We are going to create a special wheelchair for President Mugabe until he rules to 100 years, because that’s what we want,’ she joked. ‘If God decides to take him, then we would rather field him as a corpse.’
But the age of Mugabe is now over, much to the relief of those who have suffered under him.
The question is, will what comes next be any better?