Political Update - Zimbabwe

President Robert Mugabe celebrated his 85th birthday today. He has maintained power in Zimbabwe since 1980, and presided over an especially chaotic time since amending the constitution in 2000 to give security forces free reign to seize white-owned farms. Facing hyperinflation, hunger, and the government’s violent intimidation of the political opposition, Zimbabweans – by most accounts – ousted Mugabe from power in the 2008 general elections. Mugabe’s opponent for the Presidency, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), won the first round of voting, very likely passing the 50% threshold necessary to prevent a second round. Though when results were released in May – a full month after the election on 29 March – Tsvangirai failed to meet the threshold, and Mugabe called for a run-off. Tsvangirai initially agreed, but as violence continued throughout the country, he recanted, Mugabe was sworn in, and pressure intensified for Mugabe to step down for good. International involvement in the crisis was led by a South African power-sharing initiative; by January of this year – a full nine months after the election – an agreement was finalized between the MDC and Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party, key points of which include:

• Mugabe remaining as President,
• Tsvangirai becoming Prime Minister (a position abolished by Mugabe in 1987),
• A Cabinet to be presided over by Mugabe,
• A select Council of Ministers to be presided over by Tsvangirai, including 16 MDC members (three of whom belong to the smaller rival MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara) and 15 ZANU-PF members,
• and perhaps most significantly, a reconfiguring of the notorious Joint Operations Command – which includes the heads of the military and security operations in the country – into the National Security Council, on which Tsvangirai and his deputies will sit.

In the last two weeks, the agreement has been passed by parliament, and President Mugabe has been busy stuffing his cabinet with political allies and arresting Tsvangirai’s white Deputy Agriculture Minister Roy Bennett on questionable weapons charges. The Zimbabwean economy is in such dire straits that we can only hope the agreement can bring some stability, though one might argue that stability is not one of Mugabe’s strong suits.