Whatever happens with the ongoing negotiation impasse in Zimbabwe, there are social realities that no agreement will be able to reconcile. Even if the process of forging a unity government proves successful, that will mark a beginning of a long slog, not a triumphal endpoint. Hunger is rampant throughout the country with the food crisis expected to grow worse. And inflation continues to spiral unabated even as the government continues to pursue gimmicky fiscal policies.
Robert Mugabe is strangely optimistic that there will be a resolution by week's end, but he is hardly a reliable broker in all of this, and one imagines that his optimism (and hints about opening up Zimbabwe's notoriously closed media culture) is largely tied to his hope that the Western nations will lift sanctions. Mugabe has continued to be the chief impediment to political progress. There is no real reason to believe that anything has changed on that front in the last few days.
