North Korea Bags $5 Million for Building Two Mugabe Statues

North Korea may be cut off from much of the world, but the so-called Hermit Kingdom manages to run a thriving multimillion-dollar business building monuments, statues, museums, sports stadiums, and more for a long list of countries, many of them in Africa. Its most recent deal fetched $5 million for two statues of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s longtime president, to mark the leader’s 90th birthday.

The larger of the two Mugabe works, a 30-foot-tall bronze sculpture worth about $3.5 million, will be prominently displayed in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, according to African news site Telescope News. The smaller effigy, worth $1.5 million, will be placed in a museum in Mugabe’s rural hometown of Zvimba. Commissioned in 2009, the statues are said to be ready for delivery, according to the Zimbabwe news service Bulawayo24.