Zimbabwe's so-called power-sharing deal is two weeks old, and no power has been shared. No Cabinet posts of any significance have been ceded to the former Opposition. Western diplomats in Harare fear a slide back to de facto dictatorship, and Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, is in danger of being outmanoeuvred.

Mr Mugabe promised yesterday that the deal would be finalised this week. Yet his record inspires no optimism. When he appeared on September 15 to sign what now appears to have been only the vaguest agreement, he was booed in public for the first time in decades. But outside, his paramilitaries proceeded as if nothing had happened, chasing and beating opposition supporters. Since then it has become painfully clear that Mr Tsvangirai signed - and Thabo Mbeki, then the South African President, approved - a deal with no concrete undertakings as to how ministries would be divided between Zanu (PF) and the MDC, nor any compulsion to make any.

Details were unclear because they did not exist. Mr Mugabe was said to have insisted on keeping control of the Army. It was assumed that Mr Tsvangirai had agreed on the assumption that he would take over the Home Affairs Ministry and with it the police. He has not done so.

Aid agencies say the country's grain stocks will run out next month. Famine looms. Children will die. Mr Mugabe will blame the West. Kgalema Motlanthe, South Africa's interim President, will have an historic chance to reject out of hand Mr Mugabe's delusional and dangerous narrative of colonial persecution and make clear that, as anything more powerful than a figurehead, the old man's time is up.