One-Sudan policy strained by looming election, referendum

The long-held policy of one united Sudan seems to be crumbling.

No less a person than Sudanese Vice-President Salva Kiir says Southerners would be better off with a separate state.

It is a clear indication that the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement is changing tack.

Mr Kiir came out strongly on this issue recently, saying that in a united Sudan, Southerners will continue being treated as “second class citizens”.

The vice-president’s stance — ahead of the 2011 referendum to decide the fate of the south — is the culmination of complaints by southerners that the north has failed to make unity attractive.

The SPLM, under the leadership of Dr John Garang, launched a rebellion in 1983 on the principle of one united Sudan regardless of race, religion and colour.

And until his death in a plane crash in July 2005, Dr Garang was for the idea of mobilising all communities in Sudan dissatisfied with the Khartoum rule to vote nationally for SPLM leadership.

Only Khartoum and its environs are at currently peace with the NCP leadership.

Darfur, in the west, the extreme north, the east and the south all feel they have been left out of national leadership and resource allocation since independence in 1956.

Although top SPLM officials have subsequently tried to downplay what Mr Kiir said, terming it a mere reiteration of Dr Garang’s statement during the signing of the Sudanese peace deal in Nairobi in January 2005, Mr Kiir seems to have embarked on making a separate state a reality.

According to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the north was to make unity attractive to the south within a six-year interim period, by allocating adequate resources to infrastructure and improving people’s lives.

In a recent interview with The EastAfrican in Nairobi, the GOSS Minister for Regional Co-operation and Foreign Affairs, Oyay Deng Ajak, said the north has made “zero” efforts to make unity attractive to the south in the past four years.

Since the death of Dr Garang, there have been simmering debates within the SPLM over whether the former rebels should have a go at the country’s leadership in next year’s elections, or concentrate mainly on secession.

The SPLM had the option of gunning for the national presidency by wooing the UMMA party of the former Prime Minister, Sadique al-Mahdi. Mr Mahdi was ousted by al-Bashir in a coup in 1989.

Also, the SPLM could have courted the Popular National Congress of Hassan al-Turabi, who was the power behind al-Bashir’s ascendancy to power, as well as other smaller parties, to join hands and defeat NCP in national elections.