Aid agencies have accused Robert Mugabe of cutting their lifeline to millions of starving Zimbabweans after he imposed sweeping new bank restrictions which have made it impossible for them to finance their operations.

In a bid to stop speculators profiteering on the wide gulf between the official and black market exchange rates, the Zimbabwean reserve bank has cancelled the inter-bank money transfer system used by businesses and aid agencies to move cash around.

With daily cash withdrawals limited to Z$50,000 a day - worth just £1.20 given Zimbabwe’s current soaring inflation rate - it has become impossible for relief workers to make the large payments necessary to buy and distribute food or pay staff wages.

The banking restriction came despite a warning last week by the United Nations that nearly one third of Zimbabwean under-fives were now malnourished, and that nearly half the population would depend on emergency food aid by next year.

“We cannot get money from the banks to pay people to distribute the food, it is as simple as that,” said the operations manager of one of the top three distributing agencies, which has been working in Zimbabwe for the last 16 years.

“We can’t pay our staff hotel bills, or buy food for our field workers, or even advertise for people we need to hire to distribute food,” he said. “We have enough food in the warehouse to ensure no one starves, and we have enough money in the bank to finance our operations, but the Reserve Bank (of Zimbabwe) will not give us access to it.”

The aid agencies spoke out as power sharing talks between Mr Mugabe’s ruling Zanu PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, appeared to be on the verge of collapse.

Mr Tsvangirai is refusing to give way to Mr Mugabe’s insistence that Zanu-PF should remain in control of the home affairs ministry, which controls the security forces widely blamed for intimidating and killing MDC supporters following elections earlier this year.

“The (powersharing) agreement is rubbish,” one Western diplomat told The Sunday Telegraph. “It is a pathetic agreement and it was only a question of time before it collapsed, as Zanu PF has no intention of abiding by any of its conditions.”

Both sides have now asked the Southern African Development Community to intervene in the talks mediated by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, and will meet in Swaziland tomorrow.
Mr Mugabe banned all non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from working in rural areas after he lost the first round of the presidential elections to Mr Tsvangirai.

He claimed NGOs had been handing out food to supporters of Mr Tsvangerai, and only allowed them to resume their work in August.

The Zimbabwean central bank cancelled inter bank transactions - known as the Real Time Gross Settlement system - on the orders of its governor, Gideon Gono, who is viewed as the president’s personal banker and widely regarded as the most powerful man in the country after Mr Mugabe.
Critics accuse him of diverting public money to support Mr Mugabe’s ruling Zanu PF party and of fuelling the current inflation crisis by printing banknotes.

When he cancelled inter bank transfers, he made no exception for humanitarian agencies. Now, like the rest of the population, they are struggling to operate in a country where cash devalues so fast that every supplier demands instant cash payment.

“We have workers stuck in hotels which have no food because they have no cash to buy food,” said a worker with one agency. “Every bit of foreign money we bring in to the country has to go through the Reserve Bank.

“You would think the government or the welfare ministry would ease our way, be happy we were feeding the people, but instead they make it impossible for us to work.”

The chaos caused by the government’s latest inept efforts to rein in hyperinflation can be seen outside any bank or building society, where queues to withdraw money last from dawn to dusk, and where grown men often weep if they are turned away as darkness falls.

A senior civil servant, who queues nearly every day to withdraw his government salary in amounts equivalent to £2.20 each time, said: “We come here at six in the morning. We eat nothing before we leave, we eat nothing during the day, we have no water to drink - and then sometimes we go home without money because the bank has run out of cash.”

Last week the United Nations in Zimbabwe took the issue up with the Reserve Bank, but to no effect so far.

“We don’t want to believe that this is deliberate,” said the chief executive of one of the largest donor organisations in Zimbabwe.

Eric Matinenga, an MDC MP for a rural constituency 150 miles south of Harare, said: “My constituency is in a desperate state and people are in a very bad way. I was not aware of this. We have to go to parliament about this.”

MDC Senator David Coltart, from the country’s second city, Bulawayo, said he has had a harrowing week in his urban constituency. “The food shortage is catastrophic,” he said.

“There are HIV Aids patients on anti-retrovirals who have not had adequate food supplies for two months and some of them are at death’s door. There are probably 25,000 others in my constituency alone also at death’s door.

“One tall woman who weighed 75kg in January is now down to 43kg. I see this every day. About two million people need food now, and it will be five million by January. The situation is absolutely critical.”

AS THE curtain slowly comes down on one of the vilest regimes of our time, it seems easy to cast President Robert Mugabe as a failed politician who blew a sure thing – veering off from being a gentleman of international standing into a petty tyrant.

Opposite this fallacy is the uncomfortable home truth: Mugabe is a successful and consistent politician who sought, got and kept power by any means necessary.

The magic behind this was a calculated combination of hate, bloodletting and deception which make it possible that in the post-Mugabe era, he will remain ‘the climate’ for many years to come.

So neat and tight has been this interplay that even his erstwhile masters in Whitehall and White House have had the embarrassment of scooping the egg off their faces.

One of the most dangerous legacies that Mugabe seems sure to leave behind and will continue for many generations to come is his ubiquitous quarrelsome brand of politics underlined largely by violence, hate, propaganda, obtuse scholarship and bootlicking.

If what has been happening in Zimbabwe in the last eight years is anything to go by, it seems clear that even when the veteran dictator finally goes or dies and the walls of Jericho finally come crumbling down, there won’t be any change at all and the Zimbabwe we seek will remain a dream. Instead, the new masters will just replace the current ones and march into the palace with their bootlickers, praise-singers, shock-troops and the other hangers-on in attendance.

Among them will be perfect matches for people like Tambaoga, George Charamba, Happyson Muchechetere, Webster Shamu, Vimbai Chivaura, Claude Mararike, Tafataona Mahoso, Munyaradzi Huni, Caesar Zvayi and other bigots — only that they will be singing for a different master.

A cursory look into the Zimbabwean body-politic will reveal that there are indeed traces of Mugabe’s way of doing business. This is not surprising since as recent as the late 1990’s most of the opposition activists still had the guts to purchase wholesale into Mugabe’s politics despite all the evidence of fascism.

Many people are so angry with Mugabe that they will go to awkward lengths to sound like democrats because they used to sing praises to a malevolent leader.

One of the most illustrative developments of our time has been the split in the MDC and the treatment given to both camps by journalists, analysts, activists and scholars (the lines between these are so thin that you need extra-powerful goggles to see them).

The varying treatment accorded to both Arthur Mutambara and Morgan Tsvangirai camps has underlined how Mugabe has succeeded in planting and germinating his brand of politics across the political architecture that exists in Zimbabwe.

Once the schism occurred in the MDC in 2005, the masters of spin came forth to cast the Mutambara crew as Mugabe’s stooges and Tsvangirai as a democrat.

Personal political miscalculation on the part of Welshman Ncube ceased to be what it was and was diligently commuted to treason. Mutambara is no longer a politician who failed to outmanoeuvre Tsvangirai but is a Mugabe stooge who committed a sin so unforgivable and unimaginable that he must deserve everything bad and cruel.

Human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and scholars from Geneva to Washington are all tumbling over one another in a scramble to be heard first denouncing these upstarts who wanted to derail the freedom train.

Like their opposites in Zanu PF, these scholars have chipped in to sift through all these insults and turned them into points of reference to mean that Mutambara, Davie Coltart, Ncube and Paul Themba Nyathi sold out like Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole.

One way to affirm one’s commitment to the revolution is no longer to attack Sithole but Mutambara and Ncube.

No evidence is required to substantiate the claim that Coltart — a well-up lawyer who spent many years exposing human rights violations, invariably inviting Mugabe’s ire — has now joined the tyrant to derail the march of democracy!

At work here is the kind of scholarship which turned Zanu PF propaganda from Maputo into academic effort, while at the same time concocting eulogies for certain politicians under the pretext of analysis.
Through Mugabe’s rule, we have come to learn that the most dangerous laws in Zimbabwe are unwritten and one of them is that war betides he who tries to oppose the hero of the time for he will soon be gone. A tonne of bricks will be hurled in his direction and those who think alike. They shall all be pulverised and there will be no trace of their remains.

In this way of doing business, democracy means that the gates to heaven will only be open to those who praise the hero of the times always and denounce the villain of the times always; anything else is treasonous and you will be called all sorts of names ranging from CIO through tribalist to nonentity.
As is well known, under Mugabe there can never be debate. The sum total of all this is that Mugabe emerges as having succeeded in fostering among us a culture of bootlicking, labelling, denouncing and blackmail.

A combination of failure to read through Mugabe’s designs and total dishonesty on the part of the electorate and the international community has ensured Mugabe’s success from the attainment of power to the securing his future.

It seems almost certain that Mugabe will not go to Hague for the 1980’s atrocities in Matabeleland. A huge chunk of Africa stands squarely behind him (never mind Khama and Odinga). He has survived everything that has been thrown at him — BBC, CNN, ITV and the entire Fleet Street edifice as a whole — not because of anything but by playing the victim and exploiting the inconsistencies in international politics.

The more the Western media (who shielded him during his 1980’s killings) excoriated him, the more he beat the drums of victimhood to a crescendo and earned himself the ears of many from the developing world.

A man who should have occupied his place in the annals of history as a malevolent tyrant is getting away with a claim to heroism. Yet his intention was never to serve to Zimbabwe but instead Zimbabwe had to serve him in his totalitarian project, and he succeeded.

All those who tried to outflank him are either dead or are in the political wilderness or will soon pay a heavy price. Here is a man who shouldn’t have been anywhere nearer power but should have been a professor of mass communication teaching specifically English, propaganda and public speaking now a few steps from becoming one of the top Africans! (Remember the New African survey?).

Add to that, his ways are commonplace within the Zimbabwean society where the more his victims say they hate him, the more they mimic him!

There won’t be any climate change in Zimbabwe after Mugabe – a political survivor who simply couldn’t lead but could divide and proceed. Witness the sure and undisputed candidate for Hague whistling past the gates of justice to safety.

This, by any standards, is success.

Mthulisi Mathuthu is The New Zimbabwe news editor and can be contacted on e-mail: thuthuma@yahoo.com

“We are still in the same deadlock. We failed to agree. ZANU-PF is trying to give us a bicycle without wheels but we are refusing to ride that bicycle,” MDC-T chief negotiator, Tendai Biti.

“We need to be tolerant, patient and lower our expectations. The deal is only three weeks old yet it took Kenya five months to come up with a national unity government,” Senator David Coltart, the legal affairs secretary for the Mutambara-led MDC.

“When the power sharing deal was signed we all celebrated hoping that relief was coming. But nearly a month later nothing has happened and people are getting disillusioned.” Mwenezi East Member of Parliament, Kudakwashe Bhasikiti.

“We also know why his party is demanding the Home Affairs ministry. They held discussions in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa recently but we can’t go into that now.” Mugabe spokesman George Charamba refering to Morgan Tsvangirai.

“Mbeki must not preside over the signing of another half-baked agreement. The future of Zimbabwe over the next five years is at stake. He must hold a private meeting with Mugabe where he should impress upon him the fact that presidents don’t own countries, while citing his own recent experience.” Zimbabwe Times editor Geoff Nyarota.

“I understand the ministry of finance has been settled in favour of the MDC, but proposals on how to handle the ministry of home affairs are still being discussed behind closed doors. We have no details on that.” Unnamed government source speaking to the media.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has made some compromises over distribution of cabinet portfolios according to the state controlled and owned Herald newspaper Thursday. Peta Thornycroft reports from Harare a partial agreement is expected Thursday after two full days of intense and long sessions of negotiations mediated by former South African president Thabo Mbeki.

At stake for prime minister designate Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change party, is the ability to run a new government and deliver relief urgently to the people of Zimbabwe.

He signed up to a power sharing agreement last month but it broke down at the weekend when Mr. Mugabe assigned all the security ministries to his ZANU-PF party. ZANU-PF now sits on the opposition benches in parliament following the narrow MDC victory in the March elections.

Tsvangirai has let it be known that he is deeply concerned about the sudden and dramatic upsurge in hunger nationwide, particularly in the south of Zimbabwe.

Several Legislators from the south, in Harare for parliament, said children under five are beginning to die in their rural areas. One legislator said he believes this is the worst food insecurity in living memory in the Matabeleland North province.

Senator David Coltart said Wednesday he is watching people shrivel in front of his eyes in his district in second city Bulawayo.

Food agencies have not yet begun any meaningful distribution of emergency feeding to many areas under threat of mass starvation, as they were banned in June by the government for three critical months from making preparations for emergency feeding. They are now trying to catch up but hunger stalks most of the population which goes to bed hungry at night.
The pressure therefore is also on Tsvangirai to find a way through the talks to be able to form a government.

The dispute over ministries narrowed in the last day to the crucial ministries of finance and home affairs.

The finance ministry would allow Tsvangirai to control the aid he hopes the west will provide to rebuild the social
welfare ministries he will control.

Home affairs, controls the police. However Mr. Mugabe, with his vast portfolio of powers embedded in the executive presidency, can appoint the commissioner of police even if Tsvangirai has some power over the every day affairs of the large police force.

Several policemen in Harare in bank queues in the last few days said they were hungry, were not paid enough, and did not want to be controlled by Mr. Mugabe.

However the senior ranks of the police, such as those in the army and intelligence services, have been given white owned farms by Mr. Mugabe.

The unlocking of the deadlock declared by Tsvanirai last week will attract both praise and criticism from Zimbabweans. Many of the poor in the streets say they are desperate for a change, any change.

Others say he would be settling for an inferior deal in which he would be providing respectability in the international arena for Mr Mugabe who will continue to wield the real power.

No one , however, seems to have suggestions of any alternative to an attempt at a government of national unity.

Zimbabwe’s opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), says a deadlock over power sharing arrangements with President Robert Mugabe is plunging the country into deeper economic hardship.

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is calling for urgent foreign mediation amid claims that Zimbabwean people will starve if the crisis is not fixed.

Mr Tsvangirai is adamant that his party will have significant power in Zimbabwe’s new unity Government. He wants to take charge of the Home Affairs Ministry, which controls the police, but Mr Mugabe refuses to give it up.

The deadlock means that more than three weeks after signing a power sharing deal, Zimbabwe is effectively still without a government.

Mr Tsvangirai is calling on former South African president Thabo Mbeki to resume his role as mediator.
The deadlock has delayed any economic relief and Zimbabweans are now desperately trying to feed themselves as inflation moves beyond 230 million per cent.

Senator David Coltart from the Movement for Democratic Change says most people can no longer afford food.

“So we simply can’t go on like this for much longer without there being a very serious risk that people will start dying in their thousands,” he said.

The country’s economic meltdown is expected to continue until the MDC and Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party settle on the allocation of cabinet positions.

A FRESH round of negotiations to unlock the impasse over the allocation of ministries between the two formations of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and ZANU-PF collapsed last night with President Robert Mugabe’s negotiating team dangling the release of Morgan Tsvangirai’s passport as a bargaining chip.

Before the negotiations yesterday, former South African president Thabo Mbeki had to shelve his trip to Harare after being advised to allow the three parties to iron out their differences without recourse to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) appointed mediator.

Mbeki was reportedly due in the capital on Tuesday at the invitation of the MDC, which had asked SADC to salvage the dialogue.

ZANU-PF and MDC negotiators have been locked in marathon talks for almost two weeks but have hit a brick wall over the allocation of the 31 ministerial posts.

While ZANU-PF claims the dispute revolves round the ministries of Finance and Home Affairs, the MDC is adamant the stalemate is on all Cabinet portfolios and the 10 posts for provincial governors.
ZANU-PF has since last week demanded all key ministries in the all-inclusive government, but Tsvangirai has rejected an uneven distribution of portfolios.

“We are still in the same deadlock. We failed to agree. ZANU-PF is trying to give us a bicycle without wheels but we are refusing to ride that bicycle,” MDC-T chief negotiator, Tendai Biti told The Financial Gazette last night. “As MDC we are discussing among ourselves whether the principals should meet or call in the facilitator,” Biti added.

Earlier ZANU-PF chief negotiator, Patrick Chinamasa accused the MDC of endangering the talks by negotiation in public.He said: “The MDC is prejudicing talks by trying to negotiate in public. That will not assist the process. That is a sure way of collapsing the negotiations.” Chinamasa said there was no need to involve Mbeki at this stage. “We must keep talking. The facilitator (Mbeki) is not going to run this country,” he said.

Sources privy to the talks said the release of Tsvangirai’s passport was being used by ZANU-PF negotiators to force the MDC leader to accept whatever ministerial posts foisted on him and his team.
They claimed meetings with Kembo Mohadi yesterday proved fruitless after the Home Affairs Minister allegedly told the MDC the passport was with President Mugabe.

Tsvangirai’s spokesman, George Sibotshiwe said the MDC leader had been promised his passport yesterday but was shocked that it had taken the spotlight in the allocation of ministerial posts.
“We now believe they are using the passport to tempt him to sign,” said Sibotshiwe.

“This morning when we went to the RG (Registrar General)’s office, they told us point blank to phone President Mugabe. We have no doubt the passport is being used as a bargaining chip,” he said.
But Presidential spokesman, George Charamba dismissed MDC claims that his boss was holding on to Tsvangirai’s passport, saying that the MDC leader was frustrated because his political machinations were not falling into place as planned by his handlers.

“How does he know that ZANU-PF is using his passport as bait? Let him ask for a passport in a proper way,” Charamba said.

“The RG’s office has a constitutional mandate to issue passports and other identity documents. But I know why he is saying that. Tsvangirai is frustrated because he wanted to hold a joint press conference with Mutambara but Mutambara did not show up. We also know why his party is demanding the Home Affairs ministry. They held discussions in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa recently but we can’t go into that now,” he said.

In a brief telephone interview, Mohadi yesterday said his superiors in government were handling the Tsvangirai passport issue. “He (Tsvangirai) is my boss but there are other superiors that can help him. So if he has a problem he should go to his boss in government,” said Mohadi.

Tsvangirai yesterday postponed a press conference at his home on the stalled power-sharing agreement to today.

Leader of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress Jacob Zuma on Tuesday threw his weight behind Mbeki’s mediation.

But analysts doubt if Mbeki still has the clout to deal with the differences threatening the deal following his ouster last month.

Eldred Masunungure, a political scientist with the University of Zimbabwe believes Mbeki would now be more of a lame duck mediator.

“He has been weakened a great deal. He is still smarting from his recall. I don’t see him coming to the mediation with the kind of stamina, zeal and robustness he displayed during previous missions,” said Masunungure.

Useni Sibanda, the coordinator of the Christian Alliance of Zimbabwe, which has also been monitoring the dialogue, said SADC now needed to bring in the extended team of United Nations and African Union officials to assist Mbeki.

“The reference team is now needed more than before,” said Sibanda. “The leverage he had as South African state president is no longer there. It is time the other members of the reference group came into the picture to assist him otherwise I don’t see the negotiating parties giving Mbeki the same respect he enjoyed in the past one year,” Sibanda said.

The discord in the negotiations is beginning to attract sharp criticism from parliamentarians.
Mwenezi East Member of Parliament, Kudakwashe Bhasikiti, this week told a parliamentary caucus that the national leadership was letting the nation down. Bhasikiti requested Chinamasa to convey an appeal to the three principals in the negotiations as a matter of urgency saying the crisis threatened to spin out of control.

“When the power sharing deal was signed we all celebrated hoping that relief was coming. But nearly a month later nothing has happened and people are getting disillusioned,” Bhasikiti said.

David Coltart, the legal affairs secretary for the Mutambara-led MDC, said while failure to name a new cabinet was regrettable people should not despair.

“We need to be tolerant, patient and lower our expectations. The deal is only three weeks old yet it took Kenya five months to come up with a national unity government,” said Coltart.

The resignation on Tuesday of 11 South African ministers following that of President Thabo Mbeki increased concern the shuffle in Pretoria could have a negative impact on the delicate power-sharing transition already running into difficulty in Zimbabwe.

VOA’s Delia Robertson reported from Johannesburg that Finance Minister Trevor Manuel said he would be willing to work with the incoming president.

The resigning ministers included Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi, a key member of the outgoing president’s Zimbabwe mediation team.

Top ZANU-PF and MDC officials said the Pretoria crisis could lead to the collapse of the Zimbabwe power-sharing process if it is not properly managed. However, they were all quick to add that Zimbabwe is in charge of its own destiny.

Nonetheless, political analyst Sydney Masamvu of the International Crisis Group in Pretoria told reporter Blessing Zulu of VOA’s Studio 7 for Zimbabwe Mufamadi’s resignation increases the risk that the Zimbabwe peace process could founder.

Meanwhile, inter-party discussions on forming a unity cabinet seemed unlikely to resume until Oct. 5, when president Robert Mugabe will be back in the country. Mr. Mugabe has traveled to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly and was expected to address the general assembly on Thursday afternoon.

Developments in Harare, meanwhile, indicated the gap between the parties to the Sept. 15 power-sharing agreement is widening. An opinion piece in the state-controlled Herald newspaper signed by Nathaniel Manheru, believed to be a pen-name for Mugabe spokesman George Charamba, has caused consternation among MDC officials.

The columnist warned against conducting an audit of land in the hands of ministers and top officials of Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, branding the MDC leadership “traitors.” the writer asserted that it is Mugabe’s sole prerogative to name ministers.

The New York Times quoted MDC founder Morgan Tsvangirai as saying that “if that is the spirit in which we go into the marriage, it has finished before it has started.”

Elsewhere, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the new government cannot be formed until an amendment to the constitution has been enacted, so the unity government might not be put in place until November.

But Legal Secretary David Coltart of the MDC formation headed by Arthur Mutambara told reporter Blessing Zulu that Chinamasa was misinterpreting the law.

Thabo Mbeki has got his deal in Zimbabwe, although too late, probably, to save his own skin in South Africa. Robert Mugabe retains the presidency and control over the army, and Morgan Tsvangirai, the man who bears the physical scars of his regime, has at last got executive power as prime minister. Will any of this work? As the opposition Senator David Coltart said, the deal signed yesterday means that virtually all of the cabinet members nominated by the two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change have now to sit down with the very people who ordered them to be brutalised.

For those seeking justice for the hundreds killed, the thousands injured, and the tens of thousands who have lost their homes, this was always going to be hard to swallow. Mr Mugabe has got away with murder, at least for the time being. But if the two factions of the MDC can work together - and that is a big if - the former liberation fighter turned autocrat will still have lost, and lost disastrously.
He retains the army, but the generals will abide by the constitution. The MDC gains control of the police, which is vital if elections are to be held in two years time. No one is in any doubt that if free elections were held, Zanu-PF would be wiped off the map. The issue is what happens between now and then. Zanu-PF are expected to retain control of the prisons and the prosecuting authorities. They fear that prosecutors, unleashed from their control, would do to them what they did to the MDC. But that still leaves the MDC not only with finance (they will be the conduit of the foreign aid package) but also the ministries which spend money, like health and education.

This puts the former opposition movement into a position where power and influence will naturally flow to them. They will be the ones distributing food and relief to the hardest hit rural areas. No longer will Zanu-PF be able to starve villagers into submission. That, in itself, is change.

There is much that can sour. Mr Mugabe’s power lies in his ability to exploit the personality differences between the two factions of the MDC. Everyone remembers what his close embrace did to Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu. But this is a power which the MDC can resist, if they set about the business of government collectively. As the MDC’s power grows, life will become progressively more difficult for hardliners in Zanu-PF who face the threat of a free press and private prosecutions. That is the optimistic scenario. But it still remains the case that this settlement is the MDC’s to wreck. They have the support of the people, control of the coffers, and the confidence of foreign governments. The question is whether they can deliver.

HARARE, Zimbabwe — After almost three decades of untrammeled power, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe on Monday signed an agreement that gives his longtime rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, the authority to shape and carry out government policies as the country’s new prime minister.

The power-sharing deal, a momentous development in one of the world’s most repressive countries, was celebrated by a rambunctious audience of Tsvangirai’s backers who clapped, hooted, danced and chanted from purple upholstered seats.

Among them were party activists who had gone into hiding for months before the June runoff election — widely denounced as a sham — and others who have been victims of state-sponsored violence over the years.

“I came to make sure my big fishes have not betrayed me and to make sure I’m walking in a free country,” said Godknows Nyamweda, 36, a local ward councilor here who rolled up his sleeve to show scars where he said he had been sliced by a knife.

As a brass band struck up a gospel tune, opposition supporters put their own words to it, singing, “Tsvangirai, can I turn to you in hard times?”

The question is whether this deal will help bring better times to a country where the economy has been shrinking for 10 straight years, most people are out of work, millions are hungry, and inflation tops an almost incomprehensible 11 million percent.

Some political analysts think the agreement, almost two months in the making, may be the beginning of the end of Mugabe’s years in power, while others doubt he will relinquish control of the security forces that have enforced his 28-year rule or question whether the two men can work together given the animosities between them.

Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, chairman of the African Union, voiced the concern on many minds: “Will it hold or will it not? That is the question,” he said.

During the election campaign, Mugabe vowed never to cede power to his rival, and experts believe the 84-year-old president will try to thwart Tsvangirai at every turn.

“He’s been forced into this. I think he recognizes that he has no choice,” David Coltart, a lawmaker from an opposition faction, said of Mugabe. “I have no doubt that he’s going to probably try to buy time. And I think that it’s going to be a very difficult arrangement for Morgan Tsvangirai to manage.”

Still, the tableau of President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who brokered the deal, drawing together the hands of Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, leader of a small opposition faction, in a blaze of flash bulbs raised hopes that change is coming.

Tsvangirai — who’s been beaten, jailed and tried for treason until a court dismissed the charges — said Monday that he struck the deal despite misgivings.

“I have signed this agreement because my belief in Zimbabwe and its people runs deeper than the scars I bear from the struggle,” he said.

Mugabe himself said as he spoke for the better part of an hour: “We are committed to the deal. We will do our best.”

The deal, though signed, is not yet done. Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Mutambara, who will be one of two deputy prime ministers, put their names to it with great fanfare before heads of state from across Africa, but a critical element is still unresolved: How they will divvy up responsibility for the most powerful state institutions, including the army, the police and the finance ministry.

As hundreds of people practically stampeded the auditorium Monday for the ceremony, the men were still negotiating which party would get what ministries.

Under the terms of the deal, the two opposition parties are to get 16 ministries to the governing party’s 15. It is the opposition’s control of slightly more than half the ministries, combined with its narrow majority in Parliament that has bolstered its hopes that it will finally gain entry to Zimbabwe’s power structure. Unless the opposition Movement for Democratic Change takes over key ministries from the governing party, ZANU-PF, which has been in power since 1980, Britain and the U.S. are unlikely to provide the infusion of aid needed to rebuild the country.

“Until we see that, we have to reserve judgment,” Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer, the senior U.S. diplomat for Africa, said Monday.

Tsvangirai won 48 percent of the vote to Mugabe’s 43 percent in the March general election, but he boycotted the runoff because he said he didn’t want his supporters to be killed for voting for him.
Under the deal, Mugabe, Tsvangirai and the Cabinet will share executive authority.

“It looks like two parallel governments, and it remains to be seen if they will come together,” said Tiseke Kasambala, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Christian leaders and organizations worldwide have welcomed the announcement of an agreement to form a unity government in Zimbabwe, while also saying that many challenges lie ahead for the southern African nation.

“We have an opportunity,” the Rev. Ishmael Noko, a Zimbabwean theologian who is general secretary of the Geneva-based Lutheran World Federation, told Ecumenical News International on September 12. “It is a great opportunity for the dark clouds that have been hanging over Zimbabwe for all these months and years to be lifted.”

South African President Thabo Mbeki had announced the previous evening that an agreement on a power-sharing deal between Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s leader since the country’s independence from Britain in 1980, and Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the Movement for Democratic Change party.

Mbeki said details of the agreement would be released when it was signed in Harare on September 15.
“The churches should position themselves to be guarantors if this agreement is truly signed,” said Noko. “They should ensure that it is implemented, and they need to stay as custodians, on behalf of the society, to see that the agreement is honored.”

Mugabe won another five-year term as president in June as the result of a one-candidate presidential run-off election after Tsvangirai pulled out, citing a wave of violence against MDC supporters.
According to official results that the MDC disputed, neither candidate gained an overall majority in the first round of the presidential election in March. In parliamentary elections held at the same time, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party lost its majority of seats for the first time since independence.

Senator David Coltart, a Zimbabwean Christian who helped found the MDC in 1999, described the agreement, which also includes a smaller MDC faction, as “historic.”

In a statement made available to ENI, Coltart said, “I am confident that this agreement, imperfect as it is, marks a significant step forward.”

He said the agreement would entail the setting up of a government that would initiate a process of constitutional reform to include civil society. He added that the process would last 18 months, by which time a new democratic constitution must be implemented that would also include a time frame for new elections.

“The inclusive government will have Robert Mugabe as president with greatly reduced powers to those he enjoys today. There will be two, largely ceremonial, vice-presidents from Zanu-PF. Morgan Tsvangirai will be the prime minister. Although he does not have absolute power he does have substantial power,” said Coltart.

In Nairobi, the Rev. Mvume Dandala, a South African Methodist who is general secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches, said he hoped the agreement would be implemented.

The AACC official noted that the projected agreement in Zimbabwe follows a similar one in Kenya after disputed elections at the end of 2007. Hundreds of people died in violence that followed the Kenyan election stand-off, and hundreds of thousands more became homeless before agreement was reached to form a national unity government.

“What we saw in Kenya was an example of the fragility of peace in Africa,” said Dandala. “We will not want any country to go through that.”

The World Student Christian Federation, which has been supporting the efforts of the Student Christian Movement in Zimbabwe, said it welcomed the announcement.

“WSCF also fervently hopes that this historic agreement marks Zimbabwe’s return to the rule of law and to effective governance for and by the people,” the group said in a statement issued from its Geneva headquarters. “We hope that the political leaders will be guided by the principles of good faith, and be faithful to the agreement and work selflessly towards its proper implementation.”