The Sunday Times (UK)
April 01, 2001
Building up a pile: the cost of Mugabe's mansion in Harare raises questions over how a man on a salary of £15,000 has amassed such a fortune
Harare - Undeterred by mounting criticism of his autocratic rule, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is building a huge mansion, estimated to be worth nearly £6m, on an annual salary, including perks of office, of only £15,454. The construction of the house, which according to one surveyor covers more than 10,000 square metres, raises questions about how he has managed to scrape together the cash.
Although his presidential salary was doubled in 1999, it is far too low to pay for a mansion in the exclusive, leafy suburb of Borrowdale. His wife, Grace, has no earnings. Mugabe told an interviewer last year that, if ever he found himself out of a job, he could go back to teaching and Grace could earn a living by sewing. But the house into which he will move when he retires - or if he is defeated in the 2002 presidential election - suggests he is a very wealthy man indeed. It is the latest addition to a constellation of private homes and state residences dotted around Zimbabwe that Mugabe, 77, and Grace, 36, have acquired over the years. Unlike ordinary Zimbabweans suffering from high unemployment, soaring inflation and petrol queues, the Mugabes show no signs of a cash crisis. Their new house will further insulate them from the despair sweeping the country as its economy declines under his misrule.
The Borrowdale house, close to a golf course, occupies a 10-hectare plot bought and given to Mugabe by Zanu-PF, the ruling party, which, as well as being in power, runs an enormous business empire stretching to Britain and beyond. No extravagance is to be spared on the three-storey mansion, with many of the luxurious fittings being imported: marble from Italy, crystal and sunken baths with Jacuzzi fittings and oriental rugs will all be part of its ostentatious decor. "Mugabe has spent a lot of time having to restrain his wife from buying more and more luxury fittings," said a family friend. Grace, who was Mugabe's secretary, married the president following the death of his first wife, Sally. They have two teenage children who go to a local Dominican convent. Prior to their marriage Grace was mired in scandal when she accepted a loan from a public housing project to build her own substantial home. She later sold the property and said she had repaid the debt.
The Mugabe's new house is crowned by a pagoda-style roof and will have a sprawling entertainment area, a master bedroom and apartments for the children, as well as servants' quarters, a pool and garages. Like many leaders in Africa, Mugabe is obsessed about his security. The road outside State House, where he presently lives, is sealed off by troops from 6pm to 6am. The private house will have a secure underground area and will be ringed with a wall topped by razor wire.
The house is designed and built by Energo Projekt, a privatised Yugoslav company with a long history of construction in Zimbabwe. The Sunday Times has learnt that, at the end of each month, Milos Boskovic, Energo's managing director, goes personally to State House and presents Mugabe with a bill. "Mugabe is paying him on the nail with his own personal cheque book," said a knowledgeable source. Energo, which also erected Zanu-PF's Harare headquarters, is building the house "at cost" as a special favour to Mugabe. Even so, the costs have escalated sharply since work started in 1999 with an estimate of £350,000. A leading Harare firm of architects puts them as high as £5.9m. While Energo would not comment, a source close to the company said that the value and size were "gross exaggerations". "To be quite honest, nobody knows what the cost is yet - even probably Energo itself," he said. "It works on an expenses basis only, and a lot of the materials have been imported separately by Mugabe and the Yugoslav company just put them in."
The hidden overseas business holdings of Mugabe and his political and business cronies remain a tantalising mystery. Corruption is rife and growing in Zimbabwe, and there have been a number of scandals involving relatives, ministers and top civil servants. But nowhere has Mugabe been implicated, except around the time of Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, when he and the late Joshua Nkomo, a fellow guerrilla leader, were said to have been bribed by the now-collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to facilitate the opening of a branch. The story of the alleged £500,000 bribe came out in 1993 American Senate hearings into the criminal activities of BCCI and led to a furious Mugabe making a formal protest to the US embassy in Harare. "We paid Mugabe and Nkomo," one BCCI official told the Senate hearings. "I drove one of my colleagues in London to a hotel, and he went with a briefcase and came back without a briefcase, and I asked him, 'What happened to your briefcase?' He smiled and said, 'This was for those people.' I said, 'What, did you carry gold bars?' He said, 'No, cash . . ."
All that was a long time ago and still does not explain how Mugabe may have acquired the money to build his mansion. What is beyond doubt is that it is an affront to many Zimbabweans on the poverty line who remember with despair his government's slogan: "Housing for all by the year 2000."
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