Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says there will never be the rule of law and protection of minorities in the troubled Southern African country as long as the ruling Zanu-PF is involved in the management of the contested Home Affairs Ministry. The MDC was dealt a heavy blow when a summit of Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders - held on Sunday - backed President Robert Mugabe's refusal to surrender the Ministry of Home Affairs to the MDC under a September 15 power-sharing deal.

Under the September 15 deal - which was concluded under the mediation of former South African President Thabo Mbeki but looks likely to unravel - Mugabe will remain President, with his party allocated 15 Cabinet positions, while MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai becomes Prime Minister, with his party getting 13 Ministerial portfolios. Former robotics professor Arthur Mutambara, who leads a smaller faction of the MDC, will become Deputy Prime Minister, while his party will get three Cabinet posts.

The Johannesburg summit, chaired by South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, ruled that Home Affairs be coheaded by Ministers nominated by both the MDC and Zanu-PF, but this was rejected by the former, which argues that the arrangement militates against the principle of equity, given that Mugabe has allocated the two other Ministries in the security cluster - Defence and State Security - to his party. Mugabe accepted the SADC decision.

MDC information and publicity director Luke Tamborinyoka, speaking to Polity by telephone, said on Tuesday that the Ministry of Home Affairs had been at the core of the Zanu-PF government's repressive rule.

The Ministry controls the police, the Immigration Department and the Registrar-General's Department, which is responsible for the country's voters' roll, besides other functions.

"Our main issue with the SADC is that the position they took militates against the principle of equity, which is at the core of the power-sharing deal," he said, denying that the MDC's insistence on sole control of Home Affairs was to ensure Zanu-PF would not be able to use sympathetic bureaucrats to rig future elections.

For a long time, Zanu-PF has been accused of manipulating the voters' roll to rig elections. In fact, the SABC quoted Pan-African Parliament observers deployed in Zimbabwe in the lead-up to Zimbabwe's March 29 elections as saying it had discovered that 70 people on the voters roll had given an empty plot in the Harare North constituency as their residential address.

The combined MDC garnered 110 seats, with 99 going to Zanu-PF and one to an independent.

Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in the race for the Presidency, but failed to garner 50% plus one vote to avoid a run-off on June 27, from which
Tsvangirai withdrew, citing violence against his supporters. While Mugabe claimed victory in this one-horse race, the election was condemned as a sham by many observers, including those from the SADC and the Pan-African Parliament.

It was against this background that the negotiated-settlement route was chosen.

The minorities that Tamborinyoka referred to, whose rights Zanu-PF, through its apparatchiks at Home Affairs, continues to violate, include millions of Zimbabweans with foreign-born parents who have been disenfranchised because they qualify for foreign citizenship.

Although several such people - including Johannesburg-based media mogul Trevor Ncube - have successfully contested the basis of this legislation, introduced in 2001, many do not have the wherewithal to take similar action and are, therefore, not able to vote. Ncube owns South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper and the Zimbabwe Independent and the Sunday Standard, two of the former British colony's very few remaining independent newspapers.

A sizeable number of the disenfranchised people are former farm workers, many of whom are now unemployed following the seizure of white-owned farmland and are unlikely to vote for Mugabe's party in an election.

"Control of Home Affairs by us will ensure security for everyone - including minorities - and that there is the rule of law in Zimbabwe," said Tamborinyoka.

He echoed the MDC's oft-stated displeasure with Mbeki's mediation role, claiming that he is biased in favour of Mugabe, and blasted the SADC for failing to be "on the side of the suffering people of Zimbabwe".

The MDC meets in Harare on Friday to decide on the way forward, but has already hinted that it now wants the African Union and ‘eminent' Africans to be involved in the quest for a solution for the Zimbabwe problem.