After years of a deadly power struggle between Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Zimbabwe, for the time being, is politically at peace.
Today in front of a crowd of 3,000 in Harare's International Conference Centre Mugabe, Tsvangirai, and Mutambara signed an agreement dividing power amongst the factions. Robert Mugabe will be President, leader of the opposition party Morgan Tsvangirai will be Prime Minister and Dr. Arthur Mutambara will be the debuty prime minister.
Some powers of Robert Mugabe as president will be to command the Army and chair the Cabinet of Zimbabwe. The powers of Morgan Tsvangirai as prime minister will be to head Council of Ministers, which handles daily affairs, and will control the police. Of the council, 15 members will be from the ZANU-PF party and 16 will from MDC, including three from deputy prime minister's Dr. Mutambara breakaway faction of the MDC.
In the early years Mugabe's rule the economy was prosperous. According to a 1995 World Bank report, after independence, "Zimbabwe gave priority to human resource investments and support for smallholder agriculture," and as a result, "smallholder agriculture expanded rapidly during the first half of the 1980s and social indicators improved quickly." He was Knighted by the Queen Elizabeth in 1994, and received many honorary degrees from such institutions as the University of Massachusetts, Morehouse College, and National University of Science and Technology.
Upon independence in 1980 it was written in the constitution that in cooperation with the British Government land was to be taken from white owners and returned to blacks. However when the British Government repealed from their original plan to compensate the whites in 1997 Mugabe went ahead anyway in 2000 with the land reform causing great controversy.
While Mugabe meant well by in returning land to the black Africans, he did so hastily without educating them on how to cultivate it. This type of policy is what led to 11million % inflation.
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