SUDAN –SUDAN –SUDAN –AND MORE

Sudan has much of everything, writes Okello Oculi

Sudan has too much of many things. When the ancestors of Black African Pharoes from east and central Africa started following the River Nile from a vast lake that now borders Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, they were stopped only by the Mediterranean Sea 3000 kilometres away. When Ottoman Turks later ruled over Egypt, vital need for control of Nile waters made them slaughter populations along its way to the sources till rudely driven out by an anti-colonial revolution in Sudan led by a Mahdi. Both colonising journeys bestowed a long country with the Nile as its spinal cord.

Sudan competes strongly with Democratic Republic of Congo for the number of countries it shares borders with. These are Egypt, Libya, Chad, Central and African Republic, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Unlike D.R.Congo and Nigeria which held onto secessionist territories, South Sudan broke away in 2011 and became her southern border. Her total size is 1,886,068 square kms, pushing her from first position before losing South Sudan to third position in size after Algeria and D.R. Congo.

Sudan is rich in sand and solar heat. The Nubian Desert rolls dunes east of the Nile, while the Libyan Desert is west of the river. Both deserts yield enormous heat and lack of water. The Nubian Desert lacks underground water that pops out as oases. Unlike is huge length, the valley of the Nile challenges sands with a habitable strip of land that is only two kms wide. Khartoum, the capital, gets so hot that dormitories at the university had beds on roofs when we visited for an inter-varsity sports competition with Makerere College of the University of East Africa.

Sudan is rich in cotton. Over the centuries, Ethiopia’s mountains sent forth huge flows of river waters loaded with soils that enriched the lowlands between the Blue Nile and White Nile. An agricultural basin, the JAZIRAH, so seduced the greed of Ottoman Turks, that their European agents imposed horrendous labour and agricultural taxes on natives. The zone exploded into a Freedom basin. A revolutionary leader used injunctions of Sharia Law to call out oppressed and destitute people into a revolt which swept away Turkish rulers. As the Turks fled, cotton became king.

Sudan was once also rich in colonial rulers. British officials licked their wounds from serving beaten Ottoman Turks, and when their guns silenced Sudanese revolutionary nationalism, they rushed to turn the Jazeera soils into the redeemer for textile mills at Manchester city by replacing cotton imports from its former American colony. Cotton became so dominant that Sudanese men wrap millions of its cloth round their heads to keep their imaginations grounded on land and blessings of Nile waters.

Sudan traps flood waters from the White Nile into the world’s largest swamp of over 30,000 square kms – the size of Belgium. Known as the SUDD, the fierce heat over it boils away ‘’more than half the water that come down the White Nile’’ from lakes around the equator in east and central Africa. When flood waters recede, the grasslands that spring out become huge pastures for livestock. Its only competitor is the delta from silt carried down by River Qash whose grasslands feed abundant food crops and cotton. Sudan is not just sand.

Sudan bleeds liberally when it fights civil wars. Between 1955 and 2011 political elites in Khartoum and Omdurman threw violence at Southern Sudanese which killed over two million and disrupted lives of over four million refugees. Sudanese intellectuals huddled in a hotel in South Africa, wept bitter tears when it became clear that South Sudanese would vote overwhelmingly for independence. The political idiocy of successive leaders had failed a country whose pioneer politicians waved a flag of bridging Black and Arabised North Africa. Their last hope for a new nationalist leader crumbled with the assassination of John Garang with a plane crash.

Some critics have blamed this failure of leadership on three ethnic clans located in Khartoum and Omdurman where the Blue and White Niles meet. A census of senior and middle level civil servants showed that over 75 per cent of them came from this triumvirate of clans. Fears of a potential military coup by the majority of top military officers drawn from among the Fur, led to their purge by al-Bashir, a military intelligence boss, after his military coup in 1989.

Sudan is rich in mineral resources. The list includes: chromium, copper, iron ore, rare earth, mica, silver, gold, tungsten, gypsum, hydraulic cement, petroleum, etc. Defenders of President al-Bashir’s use of Arab janjaweed militias and troops to drive rural populations in Darfur into ‘’concentration camps’’, assert that American interest in Darfur lives was driven by satellite pictures revealing vast deposits of platinum, uranium and other strategic minerals under soils in Darfur. The temptation for New York businessmen was the possibility of Darfur being occupied by foreign ‘liberation troops’; and opened for exploitation by subsidiaries of multinational corporations.

Sudan has a population that is potentially volatile. Males and females between the ages 14 and 24 years of age are 60 per cent of the total population. With 81 per cent of males and 63 per cent of females being able to read and write, any organised criticism of failures by Hassan al-Bashir’s long years in power could yield volcanic opposition sand dunes.

THE POLITICAL IDIOCY OF SUCCESSIVE LEADERS HAD FAILED A COUNTRY WHOSE PIONEER POLITICIANS WAVED A FLAG OF BRIDGING BLACK AND ARABISED NORTH AFRICA