Kurt Bassuener September 18th, 2008

As I wrote on Monday, the landmark power-sharing deal between President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and opposition MDC leader and now Prime Minister-designate Morgan Tsvangirai drew only lukewarm plaudits from the democratic world, which preferred to see it operationalized and implemented.  A wait-and-see attitude seems to have been the right approach, given the fact that the talks on the structure of the cabinet have now deadlocked over apportionment of ministries.  The MDC claims ZANU-PF wants all the most powerful ones safely in its hands.

MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said talks on Thursday had been “inconclusive”.

Zanu-PF was “claiming all the powerful ministries” but discussions were continuing, Mr Chamisa said.

“It was a deadlock and has been referred to the negotiating teams for further work to try and find common ground,” he told the Reuters news agency.

Under the terms of the power-sharing deal signed on Monday, Mr Mugabe is to retain control of the army. Mr Tsvangirai is understood to want control of the police by holding the home affairs portfolio.

On Tuesday, Mr Tsvangirai told the BBC that he was working to reassure President Mugabe that he had nothing to fear.

But as was apparent in his “look back in anger” speech Monday, Mugabe is having difficulty with the concept of sharing power with anybody:

Earlier on Thursday, Mr Mugabe described the power-sharing deal as a “humiliation” that would not have happened if the party had not “blundered” in the March elections.

But he said Zanu-PF nevertheless remained “in the driving seat”.

“We are still in a dominant position which will enable us to gather more strength as we move into the future,” he said, according to the state-run Herald newspaper.

Before the parties met, an opposition source said Zanu-PF wanted control of powerful portfolios such as finance, defence and information, while the MDC wanted an “equal share”.

This would include three posts for one of the MDC factions, whose leader Arthur Mutambara will be deputy prime minister.

The African Union and SADC, who got the Kenya-style arrangement they were aiming for from the beginning of the electoral crisis (look for more of this split-the-difference and worry about the details later model in the future), now need to press Mugabe to give the MDC, which has more democratic legitimacy, a greater share of real power.

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