Grace Mugabe 'in secret love affair'
2010-10-25 12:44
Special Report
Chinese vice premier Wang Yang has urged Zimbabwe to ensure peace and political stability ahead of elections this year.
Cape Town - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s wife, Grace has reportedly been having a secret affair with central bank governor, Gideon Gono.
South African Sunday Times newspaper reports that Grace, 41, has allegedly spent the last five years cuckolding the veteran president with Gono, her husband’s financial adviser and key politically ally.
The report says that Mugabe’s sister Sabina warned her brother before she died that he was being betrayed by two of the most important people in his personal and political life: his wife and his personal banker, a pivotal member of his regime.
The couple would meet as often as three times a month either at Grace’s dairy farm or in expensive hotels in South Africa as well as on foreign trips to Asia.
Mugabe is said to have learnt the shocking news as he sat by his dying sister’s bed in July. He is said to have left the meeting “devastated” although initially refusing to believe the allegations.
The president later consulted his most trusted bodyguard, Cain Chademana, who had sat in on the meeting with Sabina.
The bodyguard reportedly said, like other members of the secret service, he had also heard the rumours.
Particularly infuriating for Mugabe however, was the fact that he had encouraged the friendship thinking the pair was discussing mutual business interests.
Chademana – who is said to be the source of the story by intelligence officers quoted by the newspaper – has since lost his life amid suspicions that he was poisoned.
His body, according to The Sunday Times, was handed to his family for burial at the end of August. The Sunday Times alleges no autopsy was carried out.
The newspaper claims officials had hoped the secret affair would be buried with Chademana but renegade officers in the intelligence services, unhappy with conditions of service, have started talking.
Still, it is not the first time Grace has been linked to affairs behind her ageing husband’s back.
The report says one lover, Peter Pamire, died in a mysterious car accident. James Makamba, one of Zimbabwe’s richest businessmen and a top-ranking Zanu-PF official, enjoyed her favours but their affair ended in tears, too, when Mugabe ran him out of town in fear of his life.
But never before has Grace been romantically involved with a politician in Mugabe’s inner circle. And never before has a man so close to the president risked allowing it to happen, the Sunday Times says.
