Equal shares?

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Sep 12th 2008 | JOHANNESBURG
From Economist.com

Can Zimbabwe's long-awaited power-sharing deal endure?

AFP
ALMOST six months after a disputed election—and years into a political crisis that has left the country on its knees—Zimbabwe’s political rivals finally appear to have found common ground. On Thursday September 11th, President Robert Mugabe and two opposition leaders, Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, agreed to a power-sharing deal after many weeks of negotiation. This could be good news for the millions of Zimbabweans crushed by the weight of the country’s political and economic crisis. But celebrations are premature. It is far from clear how Zimbabwe’s political arch-enemies will manage to work together.

Details of the agreement will be made public on Monday. An official signing ceremony has been scheduled in Harare, the country’s capital. But the gist of the deal appears to rest on Mr Mugabe’s remaining the country’s head of state while Mr Tsvangirai becomes prime minister. Talks had threatened to collapse over how executive powers would be divided between the two and who would be in charge of the cabinet. To break the deadlock, a council of ministers has been created, to fall under Mr Tsvangirai’s authority, while Mr Mugabe will keep chairing the cabinet.

The exact composition of the government still needs to be thrashed out. But indications are that Mr Mutambara’s party—a small splinter from Mr Tvsangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)—will be allowed to chose one of Mr Tsvangirai’s two deputies from its own ranks. Mr Mugabe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, is said to get just under half of the cabinet’s 31 portfolios and Mr Tsvangirai’s group 13, with the remaining going to Mr Mutambara’s party.

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The constitution will be amended immediately to accommodate the provisions of the deal, but a new one is to be drawn up within the next 18 months, after which fresh elections should be held. And the power-sharing arrangement is to be reviewed every year.

This is a significant step forward for a country that has been in a devastating crisis for years. But it remains to be seen how the deal’s grey areas will be resolved. For now, it is unclear which portfolios will remain under ZANU-PF’s wings. The ruling party had been pushing to retain control of the powerful security forces, which dished out the ruthless repression needed to keep Mr Mugabe in power. But this had been unacceptable to the MDC. Who will have authority over the Joint Operations Command (JOC), which is believed to have had de facto charge of running the country since the election in March, also remains fuzzy.

The exact roles of the cabinet and the newly created council of ministers, and how they will interact with each other, is also key. The MDC, which had been resisting mounting pressure to settle and said that it would rather have no deal than a bad one, seems confident that it holds enough cards in its hands to make this work. But there is a risk that Mr Mugabe, adept at outwitting political rivals, will still be able to pull many strings and potentially neuter the opposition’s role.

Will this be good enough for international donors to open their wallets? Zimbabwe badly needs outside help. The central bank has failed to rein in hyperinflation—now officially over 11m% but in reality probably over 40m%. So devalued is Zimbabwe’s currency that the bank was forced to announce this week that it would allow some shops to trade in foreign exchange. Farming and manufacturing have collapsed, and shortages are crippling. Some 2m people urgently need food handouts, a number likely to swell to 5m by early next year.

Western governments have said that they would not prop up a government that did not reflect the results of the election in March, which saw the MDC win the most seats in parliament. For now, the European Union, which is set to review its list of targeted sanctions in the next few days, seems to have adopted a wait-and-see attitude.