Fragile: Zimbabwe's power-sharing deal gives opposition control over the police but Mugabe keeps his job

• But Mugabe keeps control of military and will head the Cabinet

As details of the deal emerged last night, it appeared that President Mugabe would also retain control of the country's military, while Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai will be Prime Minister.

The deal is expected to be signed on Monday in the presence of presidents of neighbouring countries, among them South Africa's Thabo Mbeki who said that the agreement would only be made public next week.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe (left) and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai are believed to have reached a landmark deal on sharing power

But Senator David Coltart, a senior Opposition politician, said Mr Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change group, would chair a council of ministers that supervised the cabinet.

Coltart, a senior member of a breakaway faction of the MDC, said Tsvangirai's party would have 13 cabinet seats, and Mugabe's ZANU-PF 15. His own group would have three seats.

South African President Thabo Mbeki announces the deal to the media last night

Tsvangirai would be vice chairman of the Cabinet and have six deputy ministers while Mugabe's party will have eight.

But the devil will lie in the detail and in the ability of President Mugabe and Mr Tsvangirai to wield genuine authority.

Mugabe, 84, has made no statement on the deal which followed seven weeks of talks and this year's election violence but some opposition MDC voices have already called the deal a climbdown.

There has been a muted reaction on the streets of Harare.

MDC chairman and Zimbabwe's parliamentary speaker Lovemore Moyo said that although his party was pleased with the deal, it had been a compromise.

'We wanted a titular head of state with an executive prime minister but that did not happen.

'So what we got at the end of the day perhaps was probably nearly a sister-sister power-sharing, so I'm saying it's not exactly initially what we wanted,' he said.

Negotiations started at the end of July, but had stalled over the allocation of executive power between Mr Mugabe and Mr Tsvangirai, bitter rivals for a decade.

Zimbabwe has the fastest shrinking economy in the world with annual inflation of more than 11,000,000 per cent.

President Robert Mugabe has held absolute control over Zimbabwe, crushing political rivals

Mr Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, won a controversial presidential run-off election in June.

He ran unopposed after Mr Tsvangirai withdrew, claiming the MDC was the target of state-sponsored violence.

In the first round of the presidential election in March, Mr Tsvangirai gained more votes than Mr Mugabe, but official results say he did not pass the 50 per cent threshold for outright victory.