In his moving memoir of Zimbabwe’s years of political and human decline, the journalist Peter Godwin describes a queue of poor people waiting at the supermarket to collect a few pennies for empty bottles they have scavenged. They watch sullenly as beneficiaries of the regime, coming out of the other door, load “their Pajeros and Range Rovers and Mercs with mountains of groceries.”

That scene, writes The Guardian of London yesterday, vividly underlines the distance and the difference between those who suffer and those who plunder in a divided society. That distance has become even wider in the past few months as the resort to physical force, and sometimes to extremes of horribly ingenious violence, has become more frequent. Thus it is that the problem which Zimbabwe faces today is not whether Mugabe himself will survive politically. He may, or he may not, with the odds probably in favor of an early departure. But much more important is whether the regime’s long tail of one-party rule apparatchiks, corrupt officials, compromised army and police officers, avaricious black marketeers, co-opted lawyers and vicious street-corner enforcers will remain long after he is gone, undermining the country’s chances of making a new start.

It is true that Zimbabwe needs an agreement on a transitional government in which members of the old regime will for a time share power with the opposition. That appears to be the only practical way forward, and it was the preferred solution of most members of the African Union, as they deliberated in Sharm El-Sheikh yesterday.

But the danger lurking behind the various proposals being canvassed is that the wrong kind of deal could end by consolidating some of the most repellent elements in the regime while absorbing and subordinating the opposition. Both Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai want a deal. Tsvangirai, given all that has happened, has been almost embarrassingly deferential in his recent remarks about the ZANU-PF leader, but then both men are, in their different ways, desperate. The election campaign has been essentially about the terms on which they will talk. When they do, those with some influence over the parties — Zimbabwe’s neighbors, the African Union — should be clear about one thing above all: Mugabeism without Mugabe would be the worst possible outcome.