He was in his element as he usually is when he is talking about identity and economics. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has for some time now been telling fellow Africans that those who preoccupy themselves with issues of identity and disregard thinking about how to achieve prosperity are enemies of their own societies and of Africa.

He has no time for Africans who like talking about how they are Muslim, Christian, Arab, or pagan. The pronouncements were a pointed message to his hosts, President Mohammed Omar al-Bashir and the government of Sudan.

Identity has been a big problem in Sudan, so much so that it has almost destroyed the country and led to the birth of South Sudan and to the continued persistence within what remained thereafter, of armed insurgencies.

Since the country split into two, however, some very interesting processes have been going on in the two resulting states. We know what South Sudan has come to, what damage it has inflicted on itself.

Meanwhile, up North, President Bashir’s government has been pursuing peace with the ultimate aim of birthing a “New Sudan” in which violent political conflict becomes alien to the way the country’s elite practise politics.

The idea of a New Sudan is hardly original. It is what the late John Garang sought to create, a country that would be for all its citizens, and “not an Arabic-speaking and Muslim country” – which, he added, “is an impossible project”.

And neither was Garang alone in conceptualising a new country after the guns had fallen silent. It may not carry the label “new,” but post-apartheid South Africa is another such country. And closer to home, there is post-genocide Rwanda, where the concept “New Rwanda” captures achievements already made, but also its aspirations for a future with neither sectarian bigotry nor violently partisan politics.

And then there is Uganda where experimentation with Museveni’s no-party politics came to a premature end whose bitter fruit Ugandans have been harvesting in small doses. We shall come back to that. For now, let’s go back to Sudan.

It was on October 10 that President Museveni made his speech in the National Friendship Hall in Khartoum. Sudanese belonging to some 90 political parties and armed groups, had only recently concluded two years of a National Dialogue launched by President Bashir in 2014 “to discuss all pressing issues.”

They had just signed an agreement whose key tenets are human rights, political accountability and transparency, women’s empowerment, and unity in diversity.

We won’t know how serious all this is until the Sudanese have had time to test it. So let’s leave that aside. For now, though, it is important to pay attention to President Bashir’s promise that “there is no chance after this for violence to characterise our politics.”

In the light of this undertaking, it was fitting for President Museveni to “salute Bashir and the people of Sudan for, after 60 years of trouble, sitting down in a national dialogue and finding out what the problem is. You have come to a good consensus and I congratulate you on that achievement. It is good for the political class in Sudan.”

But Museveni was not in Khartoum to witness and talk about only Sudanese sorting out their longstanding issues. He was there to consolidate his own reconciliation with President Bashir: “I had not come to Sudan for a long time because we had misunderstandings. But I got in touch with some people who linked me to Field Marshal Bashir and we spoke. I was here a few months ago and I am back”.

This revelation and his belief that the consensus arrived at by Bashir and his rivals “is good for the political class in Sudan” takes us straight back to his experimentation with consensus-driven no-party politics in Uganda, which an admittedly small but growing number of observers wonder if Ugandans were too quick to jettison.

It is easy to find the answer to why the question is exercising some people’s minds. For one thing, let’s face it, the return to multiparty competition gave rise to some bad practices among Uganda’s political class. One such practice is vote-buying and the corrupting influence it has had on candidates and voters alike.

Then there is rigging. It takes several forms, from ballot stuffing to obstruction of rivals’ polling agents. And when these two are deemed insufficient, there is good old violence and defiance and disruption campaigns that bring whole suburbs to a standstill as those holding power and their rivals fight it out with sticks, stones, even guns.

Unfortunately, all attempts to get the political class to talk about how to organise and practise politics without violent confrontation have come to nothing. Surely, if consensus is good for Sudan’s political class, it ought to be good for Uganda’s too.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]