HARARE — Soon after being shoe-horned into the top ranks of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, the wife of ageing leader President Robert Mugabe has gained a PhD in orphanages, seen as the latest sign that she may be destined for high office.
In a country where the path to power is paved with academic letters, analysts said the timing of the First Lady’s surprise qualification was no coincidence. Armed with a PhD, a seat in the Zanu PF politburo and her 90-year-old husband’s ear at home, Grace has become a political force as the battle hots up to succeed the only leader Zimbabwe has known since independence in 1980.
Some have even speculated that Africa’s oldest leader is grooming his 49-year-old wife, nicknamed “Gucci Grace” for her reputed dedication to shopping, to take over.
Although her Zanu PF credentials are thin, a group of female members recently launched plans to install her at the helm of their Women’s League.
Tongues wagged harder still when she completed her doctorate last week, just three months after it was announced that she was doing one.
“This is a political conferment. A lot of politically connected individuals have been getting free degrees here and at other State universities,” a source at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), whose chancellor Robert Mugabe has seven degrees, told an opposition newspaper.
The UZ declined to comment, but a source there told Reuters she enrolled for a masters in 2011 and her tutor considered her research to be “ground-breaking and contributing enormously to the body of knowledge” so it was upgraded to a doctorate.
Her qualification was celebrated in Zanu PF, where it was also taken as a sign of her rising prominence.
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“It was not given. It was acquired quietly without her telling the world,” Zanu PF Member of Parliament Justice Mayor Wadyajena said a day after her graduation.
“Women, youths and chiefs say to Dr Mugabe, the sky is the limit.”
One Zanu PF politburo member told Reuters that Mugabe, who has always kept rivals guessing on his next move, could step down once he has secured a final five-year term in 2018 — by which time he will be 94 — to make way for his wife.
However, this could prove too much for Zanu PF generals who have always stated they will not recognise a leader who did not fight in the 1970s liberation war against the white-minority government of then-Rhodesia.
That includes Grace, a secretary in the presidential office when she met Mugabe and started an affair while his first wife, Sally, was terminally ill. “Being the Machiavellian political operator he is, Mugabe is wise enough to know the red line in Zanu PF which he himself cannot cross,” Eldred Masunungure, a political science lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe said.
“So I clearly dismiss the possibility of her taking over the crown. The crown is too heavy. She will be swallowed whole. Zanu PF is more and more carnivorous and she will be consumed.” — Reuters
