Settle..Comrade

Yasir Arman, the SPLM presidential candidate for the April 2010 election who slipped out or was swept out of the race hours before it started has lately made it a habit to issue short fatwa like statements on current affairs in a manner between commentary of a columnist and position of a politician, signed in his personal capacity however with the resounding tag Vice Secretary General of the SPLM.

In the last such curious item of writing signed 22 August 2010, more like a proclamation of the Sayed Abdel Rahman (SAR) or his rival Sayed Ali Mirghani (SAM), Yasir promised in the title to expose the underlying iceberg of the conflict between the Minister of Sport and Youth, Haj Majid Suwar, and the Sudan Football Association chief (or ex-chief), Kamal Shadad, on the grounds that many a concerned citizen has asked him to delineate the SPLM position on the matter. After reading the statement one is still left with the tip of the iceberg and nothing of its mass. Instead of findings Yasir, and rightly so, in the manner of the regular commentator, demands restoration of the popular democratic nature of sports clubs and criticizes the aggressive business transformation and politicisation, read NCPisation, of sports, meaning here football clubs.

What is relevant here is not the matter of Yasir’s cursory remarks or the content of his insights into affairs of public interest, rather his wild ride outside SPLM institutions, since not even Salva Kiir, Chairman of the SPLM, makes such abound proclamations signed single-handed, and prefers to pass them shift and toggle through the SPLM Politburo. What we are reading are features of disillusion combined with a passion of grandeur; the attempts of one man to capitalise on the name of a whole organisation for an agenda it does not deem interesting anymore. The Arman fatwas tell us two things, the leader of the Hope and Change bloc is too weak to enter the political game proper; and believes he is too strong to pass out. The alternative is to maintain a voice, and so he does, the voice of a politician out of business turned columnist, but too proud to admit it.

With all due respect to his commitment and fervour for the New Sudan he imagined as he swept into Garang’s SPLM Yasir the politician needs to rediscover his grounds in the ‘really existing New Sudan’, one partitioned into two where he paradoxically and consequentially lands on the wrong side. Instead of the twisted unbecoming sentences, Mr. Arman, humble down, recuperate, and write a history. It would do us all good. Or else, find a political party, or establish one.