Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, the world’s oldest head of state at 92, has become a first-time grandfather as he confirmed that his daughter had given birth to a baby boy in mid-April, state media reported Monday.
Even though the news of Mugabe becoming grandpa leaked a few weeks ago, there had been no official confirmation from the first family.
Mugabe, who visited his maternal uncles in Masvingo Province over the weekend, said that the child was still in a Far East country, presumably Singapore, where it was born, accompanied by the 26-year-old mother Bona and First Lady Grace Mugabe. They are expected to return home, bringing the baby to his grandpa, in mid-May.
“The doctors said he should only travel by air after turning a month old, so they are due to arrive back home this month around 16 or 17,” he said.
At the weekend’s event, Mugabe chronicled his history from early childhood days when he used to herd cattle with the other boys of his age and expressed gratitude to his uncle for fending for him and sending him to school until he became a teacher, according to the Herald newspaper. On a light note, Mugabe says his grandson can herd his cattle after growing up.
Bona was the oldest child Mugabe had with Grace, a former typist for the president’s office. Mugabe’s first wife, Ghanaian Sally Mugabe died of illness in 1992. They had only one child who died from malaria in 1963 at the tender age of two.
Mugabe had once revealed in a television interview that Sally understood his relations with Grace because she could give him offspring.
Mugabe and Grace eventually married in 1996 and had three children. Bona married Zimbabwean pilot Simba Chikore in 2014 while her two younger brothers had just entered their twenties.
Bona attended tertiary education in Hong Kong and Singapore. Mugabe had earlier explained that his daughter chose a Far East country to give birth but not Zimbabwe because she knew the doctors there.
