Khartoum: the political economy of bankruptcy

Unlike the 30 January 2011 protests the current wave of demonstrations gripping the capital and a number of other towns in the country has tapped into the wider resources of the Sudanese nas (common people). Over the past seven days protests erupted in several Khartoum neighbourhoods joining students, the unemployed, and the workforce of the so-called informal sector. In Omdurman, the imam of al-Arda mosque urged worshippers last Friday to oppose the economic policies of the “oppressive” government. Three mosques in al-Kalakla, an impoverished neighbourhood in southern Khartoum, became centres of anti-government agitation exporting protestors to the streets. Over the week similar demonstrations occupied the police and security forces in al-Obeid, Kosti, al-Gedaref, Port Sudan, Wad Medani, and Atbara. This is arguably the largest of anti-government protests to plague President Bashir’s regime since 1995, the date of the last major student revolt in the country. 

The immediate trigger of the demonstrations was the government’s decision to abolish fuel subsidies, a measure that the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) sought to market to its own constituency, before the general public, within a wider austerity package that included the downsizing of the government at the central and state levels by almost one half. The Minister of Finance, Ali Mahmoud Abd al-Rasool, said it all in an address to the parliament on 13 June. “Lifting fuel subsidies and increases in commodity prices, these are dealings of a bankrupt state”, he told the house. Ominously, it was the Just Peace Forum (JPF) of al-Tayeb Mustafa that pioneered brazen public refusal of the termination of fuel subsidies. He warned the government in an editorial published in al-Intibaha’s 3 June edition of “playing with fire”. In one thrust Mustafa combined his regular chauvinist rhetoric against what he termed the government’s “defeatist” stance towards South Sudan with a harsh criticism of the NCP’s economic performance. The Sudanese people, he stated, did not yet revolt against the regime because they could not identify a viable alternative to the NCP. The security authorities confiscated the entire edition of al-Intibaha, and Tayeb Mustafa swallowed his long tongue for the next two weeks while on a trip to the revolutionary Egypt. He bounced back on 20 June to praise the resurgence of political Islam in the region carried by the masses of the ‘Arab Spring’. How does Sudan compare to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, where the likes of Mohamed Mursi, Rashid al-Ghanoushi and Abdelhakim Belhadj emerged from long imprisonment and exile to dominate the political scene, asked the presidential uncle. The first is the presidential candidate of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood, the second the chief of Tunisia’s ruling Islamist al-Nahda Party, and the third is a former Taliban operative who now heads Libya’s Islamist al-Watan Party. 

The abolition of fuel subsidies was voted down by the NCP-dominated parliament when proposed by the Minister of Finance last December in his initial 2012 budget draft. The issue has since then become a theme of ever stiffer contestation within the ruling party. The financial gurus of the NCP, including the chairperson of the party’s economic sector, went on campaign to argue the necessity of the measure while the middle ranks, well represented in the parliamentary bloc of the party, dissented. Instead, the NCP crowd demanded the downsizing of the swollen executive branch and the slashing of the perks and payments of senior government officials. The leadership council of the NCP devised the current package of austerity measures as an in-house compromise so to speak. Signalling the threatening nature of the rift President Bashir himself presented the austerity package to salvage the 2012 budget to the National Assembly on 18 June. He declared the gradual lift of fuel subsidies without further elaboration, the reduction of the central and state governments, and the enforcement of higher taxes on capital, consumer products, telecommunications and imports. The house applauded when the President, with the famous grimace on his face, announced that government ministers will from now on have to make do with a single car, no more cars for the madams as the Minister of Finance put it, and will be starved of foreign travel perks. 

The government, however, moved to enforce the lift of fuel subsidies without awaiting the formal approval of the parliament. The prices of benzene and gasoline jumped on 20 June to 12.5 and 8 Sudanese pounds per gallon, a day before the Minister of Finance addressed the house to detail what the President had summarized. The NCP parliamentarians heckled the Minister over what several referred to as frank circumvention of the legislature. Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, Sudan’s First Vice President, and a man known for his composure, fretted in defence of the Minister of Finance. The decision to impose the new prices, he told the house, was dictated by the need to pre-empt hoarding by malicious traders, and above that the need to drain the vibrant smuggling market to South Sudan and Sudan’s other neighbours. In that sense, he claimed, the enforcement of the new prices was a security precaution rather than an economic manoeuvre, since it is the South Sudan-based rebels fighting the government in South Kordofan, the Blue Nile, and Darfur who benefit from the smuggling of fuel. Taha then went on to explain that the government has taken the decision to reduce the number of constitutional office holders at the central and state levels from a current 572 to 318. The reduction, he said, with the exception of two positions, will be shouldered solely by the NCP. Taha, almost in panic, laid the blame for the country’s dire economic situation on the consumption habits of the population. The Sudanese, he lectured, are living beyond their means. It is their generosity towards foreigners that drains the tourism sector of revenue, and their tendency to maintain extended families where one individual works and ten others rely on his income, that stymies production. A gesticulating Taha read out his own salary statement to the house in an attempt to counter the claim that the government was spending way too much on its officials. The manoeuvre seemed like an import from those popular talk shows where the guests excel in illustrating their personal perversions and family conflicts to an audience primed to demonstrate understanding and ultimately sympathy. 

Apart from the feigned self-exhibition Taha defended the expansion in the levels and offices of government, particularly at the level of the states, with the need to secure “political satisfaction” as he phrased it, in other words the dictates of political patronage. What is at risk, evidently, is the sustenance of the patronage network that roots the NCP. The crack between the NCP bigwigs, recycled time and again in the central government, and the wider nomenklatura that grids the regime in the states, has repeatedly produced threatening dissenters, from the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) to ambitious local strongmen like the former governor of South Darfur, Abd al-Hameed Musa Kasha and the former governor of Gedaref, Karamalla Abbas. The demotion of Kasha stoked days of rioting in Nyala last January, while Abbas was forced to resign following a public imbroglio with the Minister of Finance over the failure of the latter to allocate funds for the purchase of cars to service the Gedaref government.

Jerusalem: the unwanted South Sudanese

An Israeli court ruled last Thursday to deport an estimated 1500 South Sudanese migrants deemed to have entered the country illegally. The Israeli authorities then announced a one week grace period for the migrants to depart greased with the offer of 1000 euros and a flight ticket home for each adult willing to leave voluntarily. The country’s interior minister applauded the court’s decision as “the first step in the expulsion of all the infiltrators [in Israel]”. He went to say: “This is a war for the preservation of the Zionist and Jewish dream in the Land of Israel”. Without further ado, however, and without regard to the promised one week grace period Israel’s Population, Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA) arrested on Sunday twenty two people illegally residing in the country, most of them Africans including eight South Sudanese. 

The crackdown on South Sudanese migrants in Israel comes at a time as the new nation prepares to celebrate the first anniversary of its independence. In fact, Israel was one of President Kiir’s first destinations abroad after the declaration of South Sudan’s statehood. The relationship goes back to the 1960’s when Israel began its support for the Anya Nya rebellion in the context of its Periphery doctrine. Joseph Lagu, the Anya Nya leader, and dozens of his officers received military training in Israel and were armed with Israeli weapons. Ties between Israel and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) were comparably friendly. The Jewish state allegedly provided the rebel army with weapons during the 1983-2005 war. President Kiir’s gratitude was exemplary. Shortly after independence he told a visiting Israeli delegation in Juba that South Sudan will establish its embassy in Jerusalem and not Tel Aviv. Even the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, avoids making any sign suggestive of its recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, and continues to maintain its embassy in Tel Aviv. “As a nation that rose from dust, and as the few who fought the many, you have established a flourishing country that offers a future and economic prosperity to its children” said President Kiir to his Israeli hosts. 

What President Kiir and the ruling SPLM in South Sudan wasted was the nobleness of self-determination, a demand that they once shared with the Palestinian people. The Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad attended Juba’s independence celebrations and asked the world to uphold the right of his people to self-determination. Juba announced its support for the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations and backtracked. Today, as Israel moves to expel the South Sudanese on its territory, and as Juba struggles to accommodate the thousands of returning South Sudanese denied citizenship in the rump Sudan it is worthwhile to consider the merit of principle over expediency. Abd al-Khalig Mahjoub, the late secretary of the Communist Party of Sudan warned in the 1960s that the South Sudanese rebels in their anger against Khartoum might be drawn to the example of Moise Tshombe rather than Patrice Lumumba. The jury is out, I presume.

Sudan, the Arab Spring and the Politics of Fatigue

Chapter in recent publication of the Heinrich Boell Foundation

The Sudanese Islamic Movement: the third tareeqa (part two)

http://focusonthehorn.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/the-sudanese-islamic-movement-the-third-tareeqa-part-two/

The Sudanese Islamic Movement: the third tareeqa (part one)

http://focusonthehorn.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/the-sudanese-islamic-movement-the-third-tareeqa-part-one-2/

Prunier’s war appetite

Gérard Prunier, the prominent French historian of East Africa, published a piece in the New York Times on 5 May under the title ‘In Sudan: Give War a Chance’ reposted on Sudan Tribune. Prunier presented his readers with a Rwandan history of Sudan as it were. In his mind the ills of Sudan stem from an essential racial conflict between Arabs and Africans, one that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) could not resolve since only religion was considered in its fashioning. The CPA, wrote Prunier, “was signed by only two sides: the Muslim north and the Christian south. That left fully one-third of the Sudanese people  - the African Muslims - without a political leg to stand on”. From this premise Prunier arrived at the conclusion that the way ahead is to support the African Muslim rebels fighting the government in alliance with the southern Christians. “War is a tragic affair, but the brave Sudanese men who have chosen it as a last resort deserve to be allowed to find their own way toward a Sudanese Spring, even if it is a violent one”, he opined. What Prunier is advocating for, without reservations, is a race war where the Sudanese fight it out to redemption as Africans and Arabs. He, I suppose, would have the privilege to observe, count the dead, and eventually publish a bestseller. 

Race has been and continues to be invoked by Khartoum’s rulers and their rebel contenders in the Sudanese peripheries. It was exactly in the terms that Prunier now advocates that the Khartoum regime portrayed the confrontation with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in the 1983-2005 round of the Sudanese civil war fought predominantly in southern Sudan but with lasting extensions in the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile of northern Sudan, areas where the SPLA/M found similarly aggrieved allies among the Nuba and the Ingessena. The SPLA/M’s attempt to open a front in Darfur among the Fur and the Masalit was not as successful. An invading SPLA force of Dinka under the joint command of Abd al-Aziz al-Hilu, an ethnic Maslati and the man who now leads the northern faction of the SPLA/M in South Kordofan, and Dawoud Yahia Bolad, an ethnic Fur and disaffected Islamist, was rapidly crushed by a force of locally recruited Bani Halba in 1991. The invocation of race in Darfur demonstrated its full wrath in the war that began in 2003. 

What deserves investigation is not only the resort to race by rebel groups seeking to solidify and extend their constituencies or by a government threatened by an arc of rebellions but the brave resistance of a critical mass of the Sudanese to the lure of racist mobilisation. In Darfur, where racial polarization in northern Sudan proved most devastating, the Rizeigat of South Darfur preferred to preserve the peace with their Fur neighbours over Khartoum’s war commission, even after rebel fighters of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) raided Dar Rizeigat in 2004. Angered by the brazen defiance of the Rizeigat nazir, Said Madibbu, Khartoum upgraded the sheikh of the neighbouring Maaliya, traditionally a client of the Rizeigat chieftaincy, to the rank of nazir in 2005. The government intervention empowered the Maaliya to claim land ownership rights in areas that the Rizeigat consider to be under lease to the Maaliya but ultimately their own. What followed was a neglected chapter of Darfur’s ‘other war’ to use Julie Flint’s depiction. The Rizeigat and the Maaliya, two peoples that classify under Prunier’s Muslim Arabs, engaged in episodic deadly raids until a settlement was reached between the two sides with cynical government mediation in 2009. 

The distinction between the readiness of the northern Rizeigat, the landless camel nomads of northern Darfur, to serve Khartoum’s purposes and the unwillingness of their kin, the southern Rizeigat, the land-endowed cattle nomads of southern Darfur, to do the same might appear to Prunier and those who share his views an insignificant detail that does not disturb the race blueprint. To the Sudanese who are ready to imagine a future beyond the determinacy of war it bespeaks of the harsh political economy that underlies the country’s incessant conflicts.

President Bashir’s dictionary

Following the lead of President Bashir the Sudan News Agency (SUNA) started using the term hashara, a pun on haraka (movement), when referring to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). President Bashir also suggested tadmeer (destruction) instead of tahreer (liberation) but only hashara caught on. The resemblance with inyenzi (cockroaches), the term used by Hutu extremists to depict their Tutsi enemies in the run up to the 1994 Rwanda massacres, cannot be missed. The President inaugurated the public use of hashara in his victory speech to a company of Sudanese troops in al-Kurmuk, once the stronghold of the SPLM-North in the Blue Nile, on 6 November 2011, granting the observer a glimpse into the combat obscenities of the SAF. 

President Bashir popularized the term in two mobilisation speeches preceding the Sudanese army’s reclaim of Heglig, one in the National Congress Party (NCP) headquarters in Khartoum and another in al-Obeid, the capital of Kordofan state, and in two others celebrating the victory on 20 April. In these last events the cheering crowds would not settle for anything less than the hashara. Abd al-Rahman al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, the President’s assistant and son of the National Umma Party (NUP) boss, was booed to silence when he suggested that Sudan and South Sudan would eventually have to cooperate. When the President rose to speak he was welcomed with the cheer kul al-guwa juba juwa – all the force into Juba, a recycle of the battle cry of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) kul al-guwa al-khartoum juwa – all the force into Khartoum, followed by al-shaab yureed tahreer al-janub – the people want the liberation of South [Sudan]. The President said the SAF would proceed to crush the hasharat (pl.) in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile but made no mention of the declaration two days earlier that his plan was now to topple the SPLM regime in Juba. The audience was not satisfied prompting the President to make another of his stage decisions. Sudan’s pipelines will remain closed to South Sudanese oil even if Juba agrees to grant Khartoum the 50% share it enjoyed during the six years interim period of the expired Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), announced an elated Bashir, igniting another round of nationalist orgasms among the crowd. 

Emboldened by the President’s sanction individual patriots rehabilitated the words abd (slave) and farkh (a descendant of slaves) for use in the public domain when referring to the South Sudanese. The racial slurs are in themselves not novel; they constitute elements of the ideological baggage of Sudan’s ruling class. Novel however is their unashamed public employment. I came across a salvo of such insults in the comments section of a Youtube recording of a South Sudan Television interview with Barnaba Marial Benjamin, the country’s Minister of Information, in which he asserted that the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) had pulled out of Heglig and was not defeated by the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). The Minister ridiculed the victory celebrations in Khartoum saying the Sudanese government was fooling itself and its people. 

Followers of Mohamed Abd al-Karim, a particularly zealous Islamist cleric, took things a step further last Saturday. The assailants stormed a compound of the Evangelical Church in the Khartoum suburb al-Jireif, ransacked the buildings and burned Bibles after breaking through a police cordon. Abd al-Karim allegedly incited the attack in a sermon delivered the day before. No casualties were recorded. The popular committee of al-Jireif, a neighbourhood level administrative organ, laid claim to the land occupied by the church a month before. Abd al-Karim, said the pastor of the church, told worshippers in the mosque where he preaches nearby to go and seize what is theirs. The Undersecretary of the Ministry for Religious Endowments, Hamid Yusif, paid a visit to the church the next day and in an address to its congregation, a mix of South Sudanese, Sudanese from the Nuba Mountains, Eritreans and Ethiopians, promised an investigation into the incident. The Ministry, he said, “condemns this attack and considers it an extremist act born out of individual religious opinion”, an opinion he described as “false and misguided”. 

The “misguided” opinion Mr Undersecretary is certainly not individual; it is propagated daily by al-Intibaha, ubiquitous among the NCP high priests, sanctioned by the state, and has long become the working ideology of an urban mob.