Africa News blog

Dancing to the last beats of a united Sudan

Half way through the evening you felt this is what a united Sudan could have been like.

It was an engagement party thrown by a beaming, white-robed Khartoum patriarch with pulsing music provided by Orupaap, a group of mostly southern musicians and dancers.

The band was barely into its third song when the northern, southern and foreign guests swarmed on to the stage raising their arms and clicking their fingers in one of the few African dances easily mastered by awkward middle class Englishmen.

“Where is the band from,” I shouted at the host above the amplified music. “I think the musicians are Shilluk,” he replied, referring to a group with its heartlands around the southern city of Malakal. “They’re from here in Khartoum.”

Northerners and southerners have lived and fought and traded together for centuries — and over the last five and a half years they have been experimenting with an even closer form of cohabitation.

In 2005 they ended decades of civil war and signed a peace deal that set up a joint north-south government.

Southerners moved up to Khartoum to take up government positions and politicians made speeches about making unity “attractive” to both sides.

Sudan-a tale of two countries

As delighted southern Sudanese voted in a long-awaited referendum on independence, visitors to the north and south could be forgiven for thinking they were already two separate countries.

Far from the orange dusty landscape of Khartoum, newcomers landing at the airport in south Sudan’s capital Juba wander off the runway to be greeted by a smack of wet, humid heat driven by the surrounding lush tropical forests.

Beer adverts and often drunk soldiers adorn the few Tarmac roads in the would-be capital of what is likely to be the world’s newest nation state, a culture shock to anyone coming from the Islamic north where alcohol is banned.

Visitors enjoy Nile-side restaurants where they can sip a glass of wine and eat pork unavailable up north. The south’s population is mostly Christian or follows traditional religions.

African music blares throughout the town’s markets, run by Ugandan and Kenyan traders. Residents shout at each other in an Arabic dialect almost incomprehensible to northerners.

In the north, Arab music or Islamic verses are heard in the minibuses which hurtle around the capital.

South Sudan’s unlikely hero

Southern Sudanese may not like to admit it but the unlikely hero of their independence is an octogenarian northern lawyer always close to controversy who has pulled off what was touted as a mission impossible. Holding south Sudan’s referendum on secession on time.

Bespectacled Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, head of the south Sudan Referendum Commission, looks frail and sometimes walks with a stick. But he’s sharper than all of his younger colleagues, can run rings around journalists in Arabic, English and French and handles his own very busy mobile phone traffic.

“When he starts something he attacks it like he’s in his early twenties,” said one colleague.

Khalil, in his late eighties, was sworn in as head of the commission in July some three years later than he should have taken up the post. He then made his first trip to south Sudan.

But the delay left him and the other eight members of the commission with less than six months to organise the most significant vote in the history of Africa’s largest country.

One of his controversial first moves was actually to further stall much of the process by weeks.

He refused a majority vote by the five southern members in the commission that the key secretary-general role should go to a southerner.

Driving Sudan towards paradise

Back in1978, Sudanese statesman Abel Alier decided he had had enough of negotiating with troublesome locals over a controversial development project. Exasperated at the endless obstacles, he vowed to force it through without an agreement.

“If we have to drive our people to paradise with sticks we will do so for their own good and the good of those who come after us,” he infamously said.

Something similar must have been going through the minds of mediators in recent weeks as they tried to push for an agreement between Sudan’s intractable northern and southern politicians.

Sudan is now just 48 days away from the scheduled start of two referendums — the first on whether the oil-producing south should declare independence, the second on whether the disputed central Abyei region should join north or south.

Time is running out but both sides remain at loggerheads on a list of basic issues. To date, they haven’t even been able to agree on the membership of a commission to organise the Abyei vote — most privately agree it will have to be postponed or canceled.

There were signs of some progress a week ago, on the eve of the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday, when African Union mediators said both sides reached a framework deal, at least agreeing the form of future negotiations. But politicians returned from their break this weekend, refreshed and ready to restart their war of words.

The “framework agreement” was unsigned and only in principle, they said. Both sides called press conferences accusing each other of breaking peace deals, and intimidating voters. One step forward and several steps back.

Sudan rearranges furniture as independence vote looms

The shiny new headquarters of Sudan’s referendum commission was buzzing with activity on Monday, less than four months ahead of the scheduled start of a seismic vote on whether the country’s oil-producing south should declare independence.

Unfortunately, officials were not all busy putting the final touches to voting registration lists or preparing publicity materials for the region’s inexperienced electorate.

First they had to set up the office — staff, who only moved in around a week ago, bustled around rearranging furniture as they waited for deliveries of everything from computers to curtains.

Today, with just with 115 days, or 81 weekdays, to go until the plebiscite, Sudan remains startlingly unprepared for the vote, promised under a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war between north and south Sudan.

The stakes are high. Analysts fear any delay, or messy outcome to the vote, could spark a return to civil war, with dire consequences for the surrounding region.

Southerners are widely expected to choose independence, and would react angrily to any perceived interference from Khartoum (bent, they say, on keeping control of the region’s oil), or any irregularities that might question the validity of the vote’s outcome.

The members of the commission, who are supposed to organise the referendum, were only appointed in late June, after months of wrangling between northern and southern leaders. The commission’s secretary general Mohamed Osman al-Nujoomi was nominated on Sept. 2, and approved by the president on Wednesday.

Hopes of a nation hinge on a document

On July 7, 1990, fear spread around Kenya. It stretched from the capital, where the opposition had called demonstrations to press for a multi-party system and constitutional changes, right into rural areas.

When a lorry carrying packed milk, under a now long-discarded school-feeding scheme, approached a rural schoolyard during a break, schoolchildren ran into their classrooms because the black stacked crates looked suspiciously like the helmets of armed police.

Some schoolchildren were picked up by their parents from school, too anxious about their safety to let them stay in school.

Opposition leaders and their supporters were beaten up and arrested on the streets by police, forcing some to flee into foreign embassies and into exile in the ensuing crackdown by security forces.

Two decades later,  a new constitution is being enacted. It could guarantee the survival of the country by protecting it from intermittent ethnic conflict, a political establishment susceptible to abuse, corruption and the skewed distribution of resources such as land.

The road to this point, for many people, was peppered with heartbreak, because several times the promise of a new constitution and the much-needed new start turned out to be false dawn.

For instance, in 2002, euphoria swept the country with the election of President Mwai Kibaki who, among other promises, ran on a platform of delivering a new constitution within a 100 days of election.

Breaking down the walls – Sudan’s oil transparency push

It was a just another seminar on transparency in the oil sector. Seemingly banal.

But this was being held in Khartoum, involving live debates between northern and southern Sudanese officials, a minerals watchdog and the international media, who were allowed free access to publicly grill those who administer what has for years been an incredibly opaque oil industry.

What emerged was surprisingly positive and all walked away feeling that — at least until the Jan. 9, 2011 referendum on southern independence — this was the first step towards finally unpicking all the stitches that have sewn the sector tightly shut to outsiders.

We are “PR stupid” said the newly appointed Minister for Energy from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, Lual Deng, who instigated the forum.

He said this to explain the discrepancies in oil production and oil prices uncovered by Global Witness, a non-governmental organisation, whose report “Fuelling Mistrust — the need for transparency in Sudan’s oil sector” provoked the discussion.

These discrepancies include oil prices published by the ministry of finance web site with little clarification of how they had been calculated, even citing barrels of Sudanese oil selling for as little as 15 cents a barrel.

Global Witness also found discrepancies between China’s CNPC, which dominates a Sudanese oil sector dogged by U.S. sanctions, and Sudan’s energy ministry output figures. Those figures were easily explained as the difference between gross production and net of water, gas and solids on Wednesday.

Juwama vs. the Nile Republic – South Sudan searches for a new name

What’s in a name? An entire cultural and national identity if you are from Sudan’s oil-producing south.

The region of southern Sudan is now less than seven months away from a referendum on whether it should split away to form Africa’s newest country.

One of the biggest unanswered questions hanging over the vote is what the new nation should call itself if, as widely expected, embittered southerners choose to secede.

The easiest option would be to stick to what people call it now — South Sudan or Southern Sudan.

But there are some serious branding issues. Say “Sudan” to most outsides and they will immediately think of a list of nasties — Darfur, the never-ending north-south civil war, military coups, militancy and crippling debt.

A new nation might be grateful for a new name with a clean slate.

Equatoria has a nice ring to it. But that would associate the entire diverse territory with just three of its current states — Western and Eastern Equatoria, together with Central Equatoria, the home of the capital Juba.

One step forward. How many back?

Sudan has witnessed the end of what was supposed to be a historic event.

 The first multi-party polls in almost quarter of a century to elect leaders on all levels, including the presidency held by Omar Hassan al-Bashir for 21 years.

But far from joy in the streets or pride in a job well done, there was just a sigh of relief.

Most people’s eyes were on Bashir’s National Congress Party in the north, who were accused of rigging the elections before the five-day vote even began.

But the elections were also a key test of the democratic credentials of the semi-autonomous south, which may become Africa’s newest country in a few months with a referendum on secession.

It’s not clear it passed.

The voting was without major violence, except for hazy reports of the killing of at least five of Bashir’s ruling party officials in the remote south, details of which are yet to be confirmed. In the heavily armed south this relative lack of violence was a major feat.  

Washington and Sudan’s elections: When interests collide

The talk of the town for Sudanese is the position of Washington’s envoy Scott Gration after he met the National Elections Commission, the body accused of irregularities and bias towards the ruling National Congress Party.     “They have given me a lot of information that gives me confidence that the elections will start on time and that they will be as free and fair as possible,” Gration told reporters.

“This has been a difficult challenge but I believe they (the NEC) have stepped up and met the challenge,” he added.

Gration refused to answer a question on his opinion of the accusations of fraud and bias against the NEC, presiding over the polls to begin next week.

These include the NEC imposing restrictions on political party meetings, pre-recording and censoring political party broadcasts, intervening in the U.N. tender process to allow the government printing press to print the presidential and gubernatorial ballots and a later revelation they allowed the same press to print the voter registration books and slips.

The last contract was paid for with international donor money. Washington is the main bilateral donor to the presidential, legislative and gubernatorial polls, offering some $95 million.

The NEC has not published its finances so no one knows how much the elections will cost. But international sources estimate between $300 to $400 million.

Gration arrived after the shock decision by the main south Sudan party to withdraw its presidential candidate last week, citing massive fraud and sparking a wave of withdrawals which threatened the credibility of the polls.