Goodbye, Gucci Grace!
Known for her extravagance, the Zimbabwean first lady’s hunger for power sealed her political demise and that of her husband
How has the downfall of Robert Mugabe - at 93 the world's longest-serving leader and the only one Zimbabwe has known since its independence in 1980 - finally come to pass?Thanks to his younger wife, known throughout the country as "Gucci Grace", the First Shopper. Forty-one years his junior, she has been his Lady Macbeth, spending extravagantly, ruthlessly trampling on adversaries, and fixated with power.
Grace came from humble origins, born in Benoni to Zimbabwean migrant working parents and raised in the Zimbabwean farming town of Chivhu, where she was educated at a missionary school before going to secretarial college. But things soon changed.
Mugabe married his second wife in 1996 in a lavish wedding attended by Nelson Mandela and, for a while, she played the role of quiescent spouse, busying herself with some serious kleptocratic wealth accumulation - something the fairly frugal Mugabe hadn't been known for.
She set about organising the construction of a huge presidential villa in 2003, at a then estimated expense of £6-million. The 1ha estate, believed to include 25 bedrooms and multiple spas, was dubbed Graceland by Zimbabweans...
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