Zimbabwe’s First Lady Grabs a Luxury Farm for Herself

Grace Mugabe came here last week, but her visit had nothing to do with promoting literacy, health care or any other official duties that come with being Zimbabwe’s first lady.

Instead, Mugabe came to personally evict white farmers John and Eva Matthews, a septuagenarian couple who own the sprawling 2,500-acre Iron Mask Estate.

Witnesses said Mugabe--who was accompanied by senior army officers, government officials and young toughs from her husband’s ruling party--told the couple that they had 48 hours to vacate their farm or be arrested.

“I’m taking over this farm,” witnesses quoted the first lady as saying.

Mugabe’s husband, President Robert Mugabe, has promised that his planned confiscation of white farms will benefit thousands of landless black Zimbabweans, but so far senior Cabinet ministers, top army officials and the president’s relatives and friends appear to be among the big beneficiaries.

During the last two weeks, Mugabe’s security forces have arrested about 200 of an estimated 2,900 white commercial farmers who have defied the government’s Aug. 8 deadline to leave their land without compensation.

With southern Africa already struggling with man-made and natural challenges including bad weather, disease and corruption, analysts say Mugabe’s land grabs are endangering about 6 million Zimbabweans--nearly half the country’s population. Millions of poor Zimbabweans now need international food aid to survive.

As the United States and other donors send shipments of corn to feed starving Zimbabweans, top U.S. and British officials say they want to work with the international community--particularly Zimbabwe’s African neighbors--to isolate Mugabe, who they say rigged polls earlier this year to win reelection. Western governments oppose the land seizures, which are often violent and chaotic.

Mugabe says he is simply trying to address injustices of the colonial era, when blacks were driven off the most fertile land to make way for white farmers. He is expected to square off with Western officials this week at a United Nations summit in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Mugabe’s opponents are also waiting for him in Johannesburg. On Monday, about 100 supporters of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which is usually barred in Zimbabwe from holding such protests, chanted anti-Mugabe slogans in front of a convention center where the summit is being held. Protesters waved placards declaring: “Mugabe is an election thief” and “Mugabe is starving his own people.”

“Mugabe argues land for the poor, but it’s a lie,” said MDC spokesman Moses Mzila-Ndlovu. “It’s about power.”

Over the weekend, Mugabe reshuffled his Cabinet to replace a leading dissenter, Finance Minister Simba Makoni, who has sharply challenged the president on how to rescue the country’s stricken economy. Makoni advocated devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar after black market exchange rates soared to more than 10 times the frozen official rate and annual inflation topped 120%.

Mugabe responded angrily that people who wanted currency devaluation were “saboteurs.”

Devaluation would have benefited mainly gold and tobacco exporters, who would have been able to sell their products at more favorable prices, according to Moeletsi Mbeki, deputy chairman of the South Africa Institute for International Affairs.

“But Mugabe is out to destroy the tobacco farmers, and the exchange rate is only one of the mechanisms he’s using,” said Mbeki, the brother of South African President Thabo Mbeki.

On Monday, the U.S. State Department dismissed Mugabe’s reshuffle, saying there was nothing he could do to repair his credibility.

The Matthewses reared cattle, and planted tobacco, corn and soybeans on their property in Mazowe until two years ago. Members of Mugabe’s ruling party who are also veterans of the war for black majority rule, which ended with the establishment of Zimbabwe in 1980, invaded the property and stopped all farming.

The Matthewses’ wooded estate, with its 29-room farmhouse, two swimming pools and fertile land--remained one of the most coveted farms in the lush Mazowe area, a 30-minute drive north of Harare, the Zimbabwean capital.

When Grace Mugabe visited the farm last week, she saw sweeping vistas of trees displaying spring leaves ranging from pale pink to burgundy to bronze, on rolling woodlands that met the big African sky in the distance.

Eva Matthews bought the farm with her first husband 35 years ago and raised her three children there.

Last week, the army officers who came with Grace Mugabe told the Matthewses to find alternative accommodation as the first lady would be moving in shortly.

When a black farm worker who had been employed by the Matthewses asked what would happen to him, the first lady replied: “Go and live by the river over there,” according to farm workers who asked that their identities not be revealed for fear of retribution.

During the weekend, the Matthewses auctioned their remaining 135 head of cattle for about $50,000. Half the money will be used to pay benefits to the farm’s 15 workers. Eva Matthews said she and her husband will use the remainder to start a new life. They are moving to a small apartment they own in Harare.

“She is getting a wonderful home with everything,” Eva Matthews said of Grace Mugabe. “It looks rather ordinary from the front, but it is huge. When the children were at home, we used it all. We rather let the garden go at the end, but it was so colorful.”

Grace Mugabe, the president’s former secretary, has a reputation among many people as a profligate shopper. Before the European Union imposed travel bans on dozens of the Zimbabwean president’s friends, relatives and cronies, numerous news reports said she frequently used state-owned Air Zimbabwe to go to London and Paris on lavish shopping jaunts.

Opposition groups and commercial farmers charge that her brother, a former envoy to Canada, used youth members of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party to chase away the owner and about 200 workers and their families from a farm in the Glendale district, a two-hour drive northwest of Harare. They say that the president’s sister, Sabina, lives on a confiscated farm 80 miles west of Harare.

A list prepared by Justice for Agriculture, a new lobbying group for white farmers, says that about 200 army officers, influential businessmen and senior ZANU-PF members are the new owners of formerly white-owned farms.

Government officials say the eviction of 2,900 of the 3,500 white farmers will be almost completed by the end of this month.

About a third of the 3,500 white farmers who were productive before land seizures began in February 2000, are still on their farms, but many of them have been prevented from growing crops. More than 600 were evicted immediately after presidential elections in March, and several hundred more since the Aug. 8 deadline.

At this time of year, the roads leading north and west of Harare usually are lined with wheat fields. But this year, travelers drive through fields covered with weeds and thousands of felled trees.

Environmentalists say settlers have cut down trees to sell wood for food, leading to serious deforestation. Some estimates suggest that about 50% of wildlife on private land--among them zebra, giraffe and cheetah--have also been slaughtered for food.

Staff writer Maharaj reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and special correspondent Thornycroft from Mazowe.