FIRST Lady Grace Mugabe is one of the guests invited to attend South Africa’s ruling ANC Women’s League national congress this week.
BY NQOBILE BHEBHE
ANC Women’s League president Angie Motshekga confirmed the development in a recent interview with the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
Motshekga said Grace was invited in her capacity as Zanu PF Women’s League secretary and a representative of a liberation movement.
“We have only invited former liberation movements like Zanu PF,” she said.
“So we expect Grace Mugabe to come and we also expect Frelimo (Mozambican ruling party) to come.
“It is only former liberation movements that we have invited to come.
“Some of them, even if they are not in government, we invited them politically because they are former friends of the ANC,” Motshekga added.
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Both Zanu PF and ANC routinely dispatch top officials to give solidarity messages at their respective conferences and congresses.
Delegates at the congress are expected to debate the emotive issue of a woman president for South Africa, which resonates with Grace as she is tipped to succeed her husband, President Robert Mugabe.
The 50-year-old former typist was nominated to lead the Women’s League in July last year before she was subsequently confirmed at the party’s December congress.
Her political rise, however, caused gnashing of teeth within the ruling party’s top hierarchy amid fears that she was being groomed to succeed her 91-year-old husband.
Last October she told party supporters at a rally that she was “seeing a higher post” and that she had been quietly mentored by her husband over the years. But, Grace recently denied eyeing the Presidency.
“I have never — in anyway, in any place, at any time — said I would want to be the President of this country,” she said in an interview published in the State media.
She also disclosed that she had turned down an offer for a Cabinet post saying her hands were full.
