Former Reserve Bank governor Dr Gideon Gono gave his daughter a house in the posh Borrowdale Brooke suburb in Harare as a wedding gift.
Praise Emily Gono got married to Tshalahika Malaba on Saturday in a wedding attended by President Robert Mugabe. Tshalahika is the son of former Chamber of Mines chief executive officer Joseph Malaba.
President Mugabe and his family gave the couple a dining room suite, a dinning set and US$6 000 while Bona Mugabe and her siblings gave a gift of US$4 000. This year Dr Gono gave President Mugabe 89 cattle to mark his birthday and pledged to give him 90 more next year.
The wedding was also attended by Zanu-PF national chairman Simon Khaya Moyo; Zanu-PF secretary for administration Didymus Mutasa and various other captains of industry.
Speaking at the wedding President Mugabe called on society to observe the sanctity of marriage and reject the negative influence of friends and relatives who are bent on tearing their unions apart.
Mugabe once again castigated the proliferation of “small houses”, which, he said, are contributing to the country’s continuously rising divorce cases.
“We hear of small houses. Sometimes I tease my ministers saying, ‘Some of you have small houses. “If only we knew, those small houses perhaps we would go and destroy them. That should not be allowed.
“What do you want a small house for? What happened to your big house? You are married to one person and one person alone and if you had wanted you would not enter this type of union but have tried a traditional wedding,” Mugabe said.
But one commentator slammed Mugabe’s hypocrisy saying:
“Guess who’s talking? A catholic who had a ‘small house’ while the wife, Sally, was on her deathbed. And guess who was making her tea while she was dying? Grace, and that is nothing to do with giving praise to the Lord. Men were sent to prison for daring to tell as it was. Enough lectures please.”
Mugabe ‘snatched’ current wife from under the nose of then Airforce of Zimbabwe (intelligence officer) and husband Stanley Goreraza. Grace Marufu as she was known then worked as Mugabe’s secretary before she became his mistress while still married to Goreraza.
At the time Mugabe’s first wife Sally Mugabe was battling a chronic kidney ailment while Mugabe was having an affair with Grace. The affair resulted in two children, Bona, named after Mugabe’s mother, and Robert Peter, Jr.
