Graceless Grace

(This is an updated version of the piece in my Monday column in The Nation newspaper, 21/08/17, which was sent to the press before news broke about the arrival of President Muhammadu Buhari back to the country on Saturday 19/08, and the return of Mrs. Grace Mugabe to Zimbabwe on Sunday 20/08.)

Among the encumbering tribe of African power denizens, Zimbabwe’s First Lady Grace Mugabe flaunts her place with peculiar hubris. She is perhaps the most notable consort in power now who can’t wait to personally take over the reins. And that might well just be to formalise a function she is widely noted to already have appropriated for herself in proxy capacity. Because with her nonagenarian husband, President Robert Mugabe, being Africa’s oldest political ruler and by reason of age obviously fraying in lucidity, Madame Grace is reputedly the power behind the Harare throne and de facto lord of the Zimbabwean manor.

But Her Imperial Ladyship may have pushed her arrogance of power beyond her own safety limits with the alleged assault, penultimate Sunday, on a 20-year-old South African model. Grace Mugabe was reported to have battered Gabriella Engels with an extension power cord upon finding her waiting in a hotel room in Johannesburg’s upmarket suburb of Sandton, in company of another lady  to meet up with her two adult sons, Robert and Chatunga. Both Mugabe boys, in their 20s, are resident in South Africa – a country that apparently offers a more luxuriant lifestyle than deprived Zimbabwe, which has been presided over for more than a whole generation by their father.

Indications were that Gabriella was waiting to tag with Chatunga (and possibly the other lady with Robert) when the First Lady walked in to deliver jungle justice. “We were chilling in a hotel room, and (the sons) were in the room next door. She came in and started hitting us,” the model told local media early last week. “She walked in with an extension cord and just started beating me with it. She flipped and just kept beating me with the plug, over and over…I needed to crawl out of the room before I could run away,” the media quoted her saying.

That narrative was modified somewhat at a press conference last Thursday where Gabriella said she and four others, two of whom were the Mugabe boys, were “having pre-drinks” when Madame Grace walked in, looking for her sons. “The only people that were in the room with us were her bodyguards and they were standing back while she was beating us…I don’t understand why she attacked us like that,” she told journalists.

Puritans could raise a red flag that a model and her friends, meeting up in a hotel room with male companions could well be scarlet damsels. And if so, it should be expected that the wife of famously ‘Old School’ President Mugabe, with his legendary advocacy for antediluvian ethics, would feel morally affronted. But even at that, her judgment on who to bear the brunt of her moral umbrage was specious, because the Mugabe boys at their age were self-accountable. Actually, they might have arranged the very rendezvous and footed the bills entailed in view of their privileged parenthood. The apparent nuance here then is that rather than confront the seeming default by her sons on parental credo, the First Lady found it convenient to scapegoat Gabriella and her squad in that showpiece of primitive conduct.

Well, South Africa isn’t a part of the Mugabe fiefdom. And so, by the weekend, Madame Grace’s alleged aggression had rendered her a virtual hostage within that country’s borders. Following Gabriella filing a formal charge against her, the South African police required that she turn herself in for arraignment; but she did not and rather stayed out of sight, even forfeiting chances to give her side of the incident. But she also couldn’t leave South Africa – not until Sunday – because the police posted a red alert at the country’s borders to thwart her fleeing justice.

Meanwhile, Her Ladyship stirred a diplomatic rift between both countries. Because Zimbabwe moved to invoke diplomatic immunity cover for her, whereas she was reported to be on a private medical visit and had not even used her diplomatic passport for the trip. But you could as well see the dilemma faced by South African authorities: besides being the wife of President Mugabe, with whom South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma is reportedly chummy, Grace is in her own right a potential president-in-waiting for Zimbabwe. She is in dead heated contest with Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa to take over the presidency after Mugabe leaves, and only last July pressed the 93-year-old to name his preferred successor in an apparent gambit to upstage Mugabe’s long-held position that the ruling Zanu-PF should choose a successor.

The Mugabe camp as at the weekend was reported making overtures to buy out Gabriella and her family in a civil settlement. Late reports indicated that she returned to Sunday in company with her husband, President Mugabe, who had headed to South Africa on Thursday – more than 24 hours ahead of the schedule for arrival of regional leaders to attend a Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit. Madame Grace herself was billed to participate in the first ladies’ platform of that summit but didn’t show up. The South African government announced it “recognised the immunities and privileges” of the Zimbabwean First Lady – a decision that Gabriella’s counsel swiftly vowed to challenge in court because she had been in South Africa on private business.  

We’ll wait to see what remains of Madame Grace’s gracelessness, as she seems let off for now from the tangle.

Adventures of Area Fada

Maverick entertainer, Charly Boy, and like-minds in the #Resume or Resign Coalition would perhaps have recognised by now that every cause has its cultural morality. In other words, no matter how necessitated or well intentioned a pursuit is, it needs to be first processed through the mill of cultural morality – more so in a dominantly traditional society like ours.

Nigerians are typically nearly fetish about occasions that underscore human mortality – like deaths and debility by ailments. And so, even if it seems quite awkward, though not by any means illegal, that a serving President was away from office on medical leave that topped 100 days, before his return at the weekend, there is an inhering cultural mentality of forebearance and accommodation in most Nigerians because it could well be anybody else. In any event, the said absence did not in any significant way impair the processes of governance.

‘No matter how necessitated or well intentioned a pursuit is, it needs to be first processed through the mill of cultural morality’

Charly Boy and his gang apparently didn’t think their mission through when they hit the streets last week, purportedly to compel the resumption or resignation of President Muhammadu Buhari. They had it coming to inevitably hit a dead end. What was evitable was the crude sleigh of hand by security agents against the group early in its campaign, and the mob attack on Charly Boy at Abuja’s Wuse Market that compelled calling off the campaign. Lynch mode, in my humble view, is never a justifiable disposition to any stimulus – even alleged ethnic incitement.

Charly Boy did say the group was backing down to re-strategise. That is overtaken now because the President, thankfully, is back and apparently fit. The aspiration by all well-meaning citizens now should be to contribute to effort in nation building.

But that isn’t saying there were no issues with Mr. President’s prolonged stay in the United Kingdom, which symbolised submitting Nigeria’s sovereignty to that country, and posting a damning no-confidence vote in Nigerian medicare. It says nothing of the curious economics of the officially acknowledged parking fees for the presidential jet in London, which by the weekend had topped a sum that could catapult the Nigerian medical system, if not indeed the entire economy, into the First World. And it says nothing of the seeming official tack now of crassly blackmailing any criticism of government with accusation of corruption hugging, even where the critic by a long stretch hasn’t been near the public treasury in his/her dealings.