China-Zimbabwe relations: Mugabe’s $5.8m Hong Kong retirement home

We have turned east, where the sun rises, and given our back to the west, where the sun sets — Robert Mugabe

The whole morning I marvelled at the apple-red faces of the 12-year-old Chinese children I teach at a new school I started work at yesterday. The ice-breaker game to introduce myself on my first day with them is a version of Trivial Pursuit. They are extremely curious about me as few have had any kind of interaction with a foreigner before. Having a waiguo laoshi, a foreign teacher is so exciting, like staring at the Father Christmas red stocking and wondering what bounties are nestled within.

So I divided them in teams and asked them questions about me. And each team gets a turn to guess the correct answer. The team who guesses correct gets a star. Chinese children have a spectacularly simple sense of humour. I give them team names by asking them questions, “What’s your favourite football team?” “Manchester United” is the mumbled, badly pronounced answer from the little boy, cute, dark eyes sparkly as a cherub’s. So his team is duly called that. The class laughs; he is delighted to be the chooser of his team’s name. I choose a girl from the next team and ask her, “What’s your favourite food?” “Chicken wings”, she shyly replies, her pretty face reddening as sweetly as a hand-painted porcelain Chinese doll. The class roars with laughter as I write their team name on the board, “Chicken Wings”, and make flapping wings with my elbows and cluck from the stage, perhaps laying an egg or two. This is greeted with gleeful pandemonium.

We then launch into the questions and they are as excited to find out the most mundane things about me (age, when did I get married, what I like to eat on bread) as a sleepy, wide-eyed child trying to X-ray the brightly coloured, wrapped loot stacked around the Christmas tree at 6am on Christmas Day. The best question (how old was I when I first kissed a girl) is met with howls of laughter and disbelief as merry as a Guy Fawkes series of explosions, with kids hooting and nearly falling off their chairs when they finally guess the answer (I was five-years-old when I aimed my first smooch at another five-year-old at nursery school, whose name I still remember: Sarah).

I have taught virtually my entire career, both children and adults. I have learned a lot from teaching, and, by far, Chinese children have helped me see the wonder, the miracle in the simplest things; their purity, their spontaneity is that vibrant. Yet in the same world lurks the likes of Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grasping Grace, as she is often called. Such innocence alongside unchecked, obscene greed and disregard for the entire nation of their own people, the Zimbabweans. The children I teach revel in jokes and rewards that cost nothing, whereas, for the likes of Mad Bob and Grasping Grace, enough is never, ever, anywhere near enough.

With the blood of an entire country on his hands, Mugabe has created an escape route, a bolthole for himself in Hong Kong, should all fail in Zimbabwe. (Well, how do you define fail? Surely Zimbabwe is already a deep failure, arguably the most destitute country in the world.) Having pillaged his country, he and “Dis Grace” have created a way out for themselves, no doubt, I am certain, with the aid of the Chinese government.

Of course, the First Consumer Couple did not want anyone to know, so London’s Sunday Times reporters were seriously attacked by the bodyguards when they approached the house in an up-market part of Hong Kong to take photos and ask questions. The journalists received medical treatment at a local hospital, interestingly enough under strict police supervision. To all intents and purposes, the First Consumer Couple seem to be protected by the local authorities. They are meant to be most unwelcome in most parts of the globe, not assisted.

Plans seem well under way for the First Consumer Couple to make a life outside of Zimbabwe in China. Grace has been found out by the UK Sunday Times to be looking at starting a diamond business with China.

What is the Chinese role and purpose in all this?

It is well known that China accepted the likes of Mugabe during his exile in then Rhodesia and that he received military training and financial support in his struggle to free Rhodesia form colonial rule. China’s interest in Zimbabwe goes back a long way. China was part of the veto against sanctions against Zimbabwe. China tried to send a huge amount of arms to Zimbabwe last year and only because the SA authorities refused to allow the armaments to be unloaded in Durban, along with the international outrage, did the China-Zimbabwe arms deal not go through — apparently. (I have heard no report as to what finally became of that shipment of armaments and I am most curious.

China has certainly been busy in different parts of Africa extolling herself as part of the solution for Africa in the current global financial crisis and offering financial assistance. Of course, this is commendable. Interesting enough, for all Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visits to various parts of Africa and his development of business and diplomatic ties with various African states, this did not include Zimbabwe.

The deal with Grasping Grace, as the Sunday Times avers, is that the diamond business will involve exporting Zim diamonds to Qingdao in China where they will be cut and polished and sold on the local and international market. How many starving Zimbabweans benefit from this?

It is not a long step from the above Sino-Zimbabwe activity to postulate that China is intent on having economic control of Zimbabwe, thus giving her a firm foothold in Africa, where many future ventures, including new energy sources (such as the solar power that can be harnessed from the Sahara desert) and cheap labour opportunities lie. If this is being done, then the strategy is far smarter than bull-in-a-china-shop Bush virtually blasting Iraq to smithereens to make his point and control the world economy through oil.

Oh well, business is business, I suppose. Very little big international business is squeaky clean. If Zimbabweans benefit, then I salute the Chinese for their cunning. I despise them though for the underhand, indirect role they have played (vetoing sanctions) in virtually destroying Zimbabwe in order to be part of the African and global solution, with, no doubt, China’s own needs coming first.

Meanwhile the endless reports of “Dis Grace’s” spending frenzy, reminiscent of a body of piranhas gobbling down a monstrous prey in minutes, continues to nauseate.

The home the First Consumer Couple is purchasing in Hong Kong is reputed to be about 5.8 million US dollars, bought, ultimately, with Zim money.

I did the maths. I regularly keep an eye on our budget and my eyes grew tired of slowly counting all the digits from right to left in Grace’s latest spending sprees. Let’s take the Hong Kong home first and see what it is in Zim dollars. One US dollar is currently about 37 457 Zim dollars. The final figure was too big for the calculator on my fairly sophisticated new Nokia mobile phone to process, which politely told me “maximum result is 10 digits”, which is the US definition of a billion. This came across as a euphemistic way of saying no household or even a large, middle-sized company comes anywhere remotely near working with those kind of budgetary figures.

However, let’s work with a humbler figure. Grace recently splashed out, at the expense of her country, 65 000 US dollars on marble statues — 65 000 multiplied by only 37 000 gives us the relatively modest 2 405 000 000 Zim dollars. (Hey, my calculator could do that one!) That is roughly two and a half hundred billion in the US definition of a bill, isn’t it, give or take 10 billion or two? Honey, do you have any spare change in your purse to make sure we can pick up that dandy Tuscany nude as well?

This affront to humanity, that these two people are allowed to carry on like this, is more garish, more blatant than the black comedy of the bumper sticker I once saw on a glinting Rolls Royce: “fuck the poor”.