Opinion and Analysis

Congratulating Pochalla New Commissioner

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 04:42:00 GMT

By Madho Toung Madho

March 1, 2012 (U.S.A.)-First of all, and foremost, I would like to express my very sincere gratitude and appreciation to Kuol Manyang Juuk, the governor of Jonglei state for his appointment of the Pochalla County commissioner, honorable, Joseph Okello welo; the current commissioner, based on the mutual understanding they both share (Kuol and Joseph) _ as well as record shows, especially when he (Joseph) used to work with Governor as the SPLM party Secretary General for the state of Jonglei. The appointment has been considered as a very decisive action that any strong leader could demonstrate, anyway.

And besides that, I want to congratulate the commissioner himself, Joseph Okello Welo for his tireless attempt to secure the commissioner-ship of Pochalla County several times in the past. As we know that, everything comes on its own very time, no matter what and how hard we try, it doesn’t happen if not its very right time. Nevertheless, it has come to him eventually after so many attempts, and giving the fact that, he is capable of overcoming any challenge facing our County citizens, and he can be proved as the very exact commissioner that has a destiny to fulfill for the empowerment of his community; so far, however.

In addition to that, I also would like to advise the commissioner on the issues concerning reconciliation with every citizen of Pochalla County including those who were supporting his ex-rivals; despite the fact that, they might not be willing to recognize him as the legitimate commissioner. By doing so, it may lead to certain extent in which some of them might concede most of their demands and accept to work him; somehow, in a hope that they can get some chances in the next election, due in a 3 year-time-period. I am not quite 100% sure if the reconciliation will play a very constructive role significantly, anyhow. Let us hope so, we all unite behind him in order to fight corruption aggressively, if need be. To be honest, corruption becomes the causative to every failure that left Pochalla County behind, in term of everything such as network, development, and so forth.

And of course, this will be a test to prove to us his mission that led him all the way to the current stage. If he going to follow the same path that some of the previous commissioners went through, by then, we can hold him accountable, somewhat. However, that could expose him to a punitive candidate in the upcoming election that is expected in 2015, nationwide. As a matter of fact, that is not what we are expecting from him at the moment, under any circumstance, at any degree. For the time being, let us hope that God gives him all it takes to lead the cause to the successful outcome, soon rather than later.

Furthermore, if anyone has a question, comment, concern, or otherwise; please feel free to contact me at the contact information below. Sure enough, I will be more than willing to respond, accordingly.

Best regard.

This article is written by Madho Toung Madho, who is an executive member of the Pochalla County Community, the PCC in the USA, and can be reached at madho1982@hotmail.com

The Impact of Land Grab

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:25:00 GMT

By Ephrem Madebo

It is inexplicable rather disgraceful that on one side western countries paint Africa as the bread basket of the world, but most western countries and their media talk about dictatorship, corruption and hunger in Africa [which actually is true]. On the other hand, western banks and investment companies, university endowments funds, and large corporations buy large quantity of land from poor African countries and turn it into a breadbasket of the rich countries of the world. The technology and/or capital transfer analysis of the development model indicates that large foreign investment in the agricultural sector of poor countries helps agrarian economies to transform their agriculture and ultimately lead to economic development. However, empirical studies of the past few years clearly indicate that foreign investment companies are profiting from “land grab”, and “land grab” in developing countries has failed to deliver its promise of jobs, infrastructure, schools, and health facilities. In fact, the land grabs; due to investors’ recklessness and lack of control from the host countries have led to huge environmental and social problems in developing countries.

In the last 10 years, a strange phenomenon known as ‘Land Grab’ has ravaged the continent of Africa that has already been suffering from the failed growth models of the classical, neo-classical and Marxist schools. In Ethiopia and many other African countries, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Saudis are buying a huge amount of farmland to satisfy the food demand of their own population. Ethiopia is one of the reckless countries that denies ownership of land to its own poor peasants and sells the nation’s top level fertile land for a knockout price that wows the buyers themselves.

The last twenty years history of Ethiopia is full of many dull and eccentric moments, and no moment of that history is as dull as the TPLF’s silly moment of cheap land sale. The TPLF calls the cheap land sale a ‘land lease’, but from the point of view of the grabbers, this new phenomenon is called ‘land grab’, and from the point of view of poor the Ethiopian farmers, it is called ‘free land give away’. For over two decades, we Ethiopians have heard how weird Meles Zenawi and his gangs are. I think their recent economic policies; especially their land policy has left them naked that now we can see just how weird and wacky they really are. Ethiopia is a country that suffers the most from hunger and hunger related problems. Currently, more than 13 million people or about 15.3% its population depends on food aid from rich countries. But, ironically, the regime in Ethiopia is selling its most fertile land to foreigners whose only focus is to secure current and future food supply in their own countries.

Much has been said about the land grab in Ethiopia, and I believe there is a whole lot left to say. In Ethiopia land is not just an economic asset; in many parts of Ethiopia land has spiritual, cultural, ancestral, and sentimental values. Ethiopians, whether they are pastoralists or settled farmers, their livelihood has an important cosmic link to their land. Their past and current way of life is rooted in the land where they were born and have defined their humanity. For example, for the people of Gambella, their land of origin in the grass lands and forests of the Gambella area is not only the source of their sustenance; it is also home to their identity and culture. When one sells or leases this land against the will of the people, the item being sold is not just land, its culture and identity.

The land grab in Ethiopia generally has negative economic and social consequences, and these consequences differ from place to place within Ethiopia. For example, the land grab problems in economically forgotten Gambella are very different from other relatively better-off places. We all know that there was genocide in Gambella and the current human right abuse in the region is beyond imagination. Now on top of all these crimes and wicked acts, Zenawi’s regime is selling the most important cultural and economic asset of the Gambella people. These problems touch the life of every citizen in Gambella, and may have a far reaching political consequence if they continue unabated. Here are there areas that I thought were neglected or not even considered when a decision was made to sell Gambella’s land.

Eco-system in peril

The Ethiopian region of Gambella is home to Africa’s second-largest mammal migration, with millions and millions of animals [some of them endangered species] moving through its grasslands. The region is one of the most attractive places in Ethiopia with breathtaking sceneries and remarkable biodiversity. The Gambella National Park that hosts lions, African Buffalo, elephants, Roan Antelope, Lelwel Hartebeest, Olive Baboons and many others, was created in 1974 primarily to protect endangered species. Sadly, today, the reckless regime in Ethiopia is selling a major part of the Gambella National Park to Indian companies who are planning huge farms on a land designated to protect endangered species. The Indian company Karuturi has already started bulldozing the park endangering the environment and one of Africa’s great animal migrations.

I hope we all remember that some two years ago, the Ethiopian ministry of agriculture declared that, whatever the wildlife credentials of the Gambella National Park, the park had a huge agricultural investment potential. Today, sandwiched between the Indian Agro giant Karuturi Global on one side and Mohammed Al Amoudi’s Saudi Star on the other, the Gambella National Park that hosts the 2^nd largest mammal migrations in Africa is quickly being transformed into a large foreign owned commercial farm jeopardizing the future of Gambella as a human habitat and the great migration.

Blind Investment Decisions

I remember, in the 1980s, Colonel Mengistu was the key decision maker behind every national and regional investment endeavors. Today, the Colonel may have been gone for over twenty years, but his brutality, stubbornness and ways of doing business are still the major parts of the ethnic regime in Ethiopia. National and regional economic priorities and alternative economic approaches mean little or nothing to both Mengistu and Meles. They make decisions on the fly and the outcome does not bother them as long as it meets their political goal.

Meles Zenawi has made many nonsensical political and economic decisions, and one of them is his decision to sell the nation’s fertile land to anyone that comes with dollar. His recent decision to sell 100k hectares of land in Gambella is a blind decision that totally failed to consider alternative uses of Gambella’s rich resources. For example, tourism wise, Gambella has the same potential as Maasai Mara, Amboseli and Tsavo National Parks in Kenya. Kenya’s tourism industry employs 11% of the nations’ work force and generates 21% of Kenya’s foreign exchange earnings. Ethiopia has the same, in fact, a much better tourism potential than Kenya. What we don’t have is far sighted leaders who invest in the future of Ethiopia. What angers the Ethiopian people is that such very attractive alternatives were not even on the table when decisions were made to sell Gambella’s land. The decision was all about money and selling land was the quickest way.

The cheapest fertile land on earth

One of the most bizarre and uncomforting issues about the land grab in Ethiopia is the price the Indian and Chinese companies are paying to acquire one of Africa’s most fertile land. In my very short and mostly anxious life, I have seen the price of goods and services go up and down, but I have never seen such rock bottom prices for a quality good that has limited supply. It is so amazing that Karuturi Global had not even seen the land when it was offered by the Ethiopian government. “It’s very good land. It’s quite cheap. In fact, it is very cheap. We have no land like this in India,” says Karmjeet Sekhon, project manager for farms in Gambella. “There [India] you are lucky to get 1% of organic matter in the soil. Here [Gambella, Ethiopia] it is more than 5%. We don’t need fertilizer or herbicides. There is absolutely nothing that will not grow on it. By the way, with all of these natural amenities and rock bottom prices, Karuturi still enjoys a five years tax holiday.

Ethiopia is a classic example of Africa’s inability to feed itself, hence, many Ethiopians inside and outside the country argue that the government shouldn’t dispose its farmers and sell the land to Indian and Chinese cash crop growers when more than 13 million of its own people depend on food aid. Ethiopia has a great mass of arable land and many perennial rivers; moreover, it has a swarming population whose occupation is largely agrarian. Therefore, it is embarrassing when Ethiopia fails to feed itself, especially, when its government claims a seven years of continuous ‘double digit economic growth’. Actually, it is even more embarrassing to have a government that dispossesses land from its own citizens and sells it cheap to foreigners who are in Ethiopia to secure food for their own people.

According to the contract signed between the Indian company Karaturi and the Ethiopian regime, the annual lease rate per hectare is only 20 birr or about $1.17 which is less than the value of a small quarter pounder in Seven Eleven. The value of the contract is expressed in terms of birr, so every time the value of birr depreciates so does the amount of dollar Ethiopia receives from Karuturi. The contract expires in 2058 [after 50 years], and Karuturi pays 2million birr every year for a total of 100 million birr in fifty years (20 x100, 000). This may look like a huge sum of money, but it is only $5.8 million. Yes, fifty years, 100 thousand hectares of fertile land for only 5.8 million dollar.

Here is the most shocking part of the contract. Meles Zenawi and his puppets here in the Diaspora told us that one of the advantages of the land sale was that the party that buys land builds infrastructure, schools, health facilities, and residential areas. But, according to Article 3 of the contract, the lessee is not at all obliged to build infrastructure, schools, health facilities, and residential areas. In fact, it has clearly been stated in the contract that building anything on and around the farm is the right of the lessee not an obligation. This makes it clear that the sale of land to Indian and Chinese companies has nothing to do with technology transfer; it is simply the transfer of Karaturi farming from less fertile Indian fields to the more fertile lands of Ethiopia.

The architect of Ethiopia’s land grab policy is none other than Meles Zenawi, but we must not forget that there are many sold outs that perform the day to day activities of the land sale. In this article I will expose the name and picture of Zenawi’s henchman and the contractual document he signed with the Indian agro giant, Karuturi Global Limited. I want every reader to closely look at the contractual documents and see how shallow and un Ethiopian the TPLF regime is. May God bless Ethiopia!

ebini23@yahoo.com

Dr. Lam Akol on South Sudan Referendum

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 05:00:00 GMT

South Sudan Referendum: First things first
Sunday 5 September 2010.
By Lam Akol

September 4, 2010 — Sudan is passing through the most critical stage of its modern history and is set to undergo the hardest trial ever. In less than twenty weeks, its will would be tested: either to remain united or its southern part secedes in accordance with the procedures of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). I do not intend here to discuss the pros and cons of each of the two options because it is premature to speak about that as long as we have not carefully set the political stage for it, that is, if as I believe, the target audience here is the people of South Sudan. This call is addressed to both supporters of unity and those of separation which could be likened to the call for the supporters of two teams playing a final football match that must not end in a draw. The coaches of the two teams are keen on seeing that the stadium or the playing field is leveled in such a way as not to be in favour of one of the two teams; and that it is also spacious enough to take in the supporters of the two teams besides the majority of neutral spectators whose passion is only for nice play. The players and fans of each team, notwithstanding their ardent enthusiasm to win the match, are careful not to make mistakes that might result in the cancellation of the match which they worked hard to win. The supporters of the two camps of unity and separation are equally requested to insist on creating the conducive environment for a free, fair and transparent referendum. However, I see a different environment prevailing at present. In the absence of this conducive environment, the legality of the result of the referendum would be contested, and this in turn would drag the country into a bottomless abyss whose depth only God knows. We implore God to spare Sudan home-grown calamities; suffice the afflictions nurtured n us by others.

This article tackles the concept of the right of self-determination and the reasons which made Southerners to opt for it. How it fits into Sudanese politics, how is this right expressed in the CPA, and how the governance during the transitional period contributed to the realization of the objectives of the CPA in this respect. Finally, I suggest the requirements for making the exercise of the right of self-determination a free, fair and transparent process in order to ensure recognition for its result, whatever it might be. I would begin by quoting two veteran Southern politicians who played a great role in Sudanese politics, separated by a span of almost half a century. The first quotation is from a speech made by Rev Fr Saturnino Lohure before the second parliament in Khartoum in 1958, and the second was made by Dr. John Garang. Father Satrinino said:

“The South has no intention of separating from the North, for had that been the case nothing on earth would have prevented the demand for separation. The South will at any moment separate from the North if and when the North so decides, directly or indirectly, through political, social and economic subjugation of the South.”

Rev. Fr. Saturnino Lohure, 2nd Parliament, Khartoum, 1958.

This statement was made by Fr Saturnino when he, along with his colleagues, was calling for federalism. Of course, some people accused him of being a separatist. This speech was in response to the accusation. As for Dr. John Garang, whose commitment to the unity of Sudan is not in doubt among northern politicians, he said:

“I and those who joined me in the bush and fought for more than twenty years, have brought to you CPA in a golden plate. Our mission is accomplished. It is now your turn, especially those who did not have a chance to experience bush life. When time comes to vote at referendum, it is your golden choice to determine your fate. Would you like to be second class citizens in your own country?, it is absolutely your choice”.

Dr John Garang de Mabior, Rumbek, Southern Sudan, May 15, 2005.

These two oft-quoted statements reflect the extent to which impression and reality are confused when dealing with the cause of South Sudan, a matter which complicates understanding the root causes of the problem, hence rendering prescribing realistic solutions difficult to attain.

BACKGROUND TO SOUTHERNERS’ DEMAND FOR SELF-DETERMINATION

The demand by Southerners for the right of self-determination could be attributed to two reasons. The first is the colonial policies towards South Sudan and the second relates to the practices of the Sudanese central governments towards South Sudan. It is known that the administration in South Sudan during the colonial era had passed through three stages. The stage of government stabilization (1899-1920) in which colonial administration depended on tribal chiefs in what was known as native administration. The second stage was the separate administration of South Sudan in the 1920s until the Second World War. Following the Second World War, the colonial power changed policy in favour of the unification of the two parts of the country. This policy started with the meetings of 1946, followed by the Juba conference in 1947. Each of these three stages had its contribution in shaping the perceptions held by Southern citizens in regard to their rights. Under national governments, certain developments and practices strained relations between the South and the North. This period can be sub-divided into a number of stages as follows:

(a) The stage of non-representation of South Sudan (1953-1955), whether in the political or administrative spheres, or civil service, including Sudanization period.

(b) The stage of centralized rule from 1955 up to 1964.

(c) The stage of recognition of the Southern Question (1964-1965). The government of Sir Al-khatim Al-khalifa which came to power after the October Revolution, was the first government to recognize that South Sudan had a cause, when it issued a statement that contained recognition of the problem. The statement indicated that the problem was political with causes that ought to be tackled in order to arrive at the required peaceful political solution. Before that, previous governments used to describe the problem as merely masterminded by colonial administration. The October government followed words by action by holding the Round Table Conference for the resolution of the Southern problem in Khartoum in March 1965. However, the traditional parties aborted this national endeavour.

(d) The stage of repression of Southern intellectuals and Southern cultures (1958-1964, 1965-1969). This stage spans two periods: the period during Abboud’s regime and the period that followed the elections of 1965. Deep bitter feelings prevailed during this stage, particularly during the period 1965-1969 as the government adopted extreme repressive measures including massacres in Juba and Wau (July 1965) and in other parts of South Sudan in which Southern intellectuals and Southern cultures were targeted. These practices impacted adversely on relations between the South and the North. During Abboud’s dictatorship, the regime insisted on imposing Arabic and Islam in South Sudan in the mistaken belief that the unity of the country could only be achieved within one culture and one religion. That was the period during which it was circulated that Southerners were targeting Arabism and Islam. It is known that when the war erupted, it was neither a religious nor a racial war. However, these practices had made people claim that Southerners were fighting against Arabism and Islam. The call for the separation of South Sudan gained momentum during this stage.

(e) Recognition of the problem for the second time (9 June 1969, 1971-1972). This stage was ushered in by the Declaration of the 9th June 1969, less than one month after May military coup. The Declaration was shrouded with ambiguity as it contained a clause which linked the solution of the problem of South Sudan to the emergence of a democratic cadre in the South that would converge with its Northern counterpart. The Communists in the Revolutionary Command Council construed the phrase “democratic cadre” as denoting the Communists. This question was only settled after the demise of the military coup of Hashim Al-atta in 1971. Then serious talks began between the Anyanya and the government culminating in the Addis Ababa Accord in February 1972.

(f) The stage of regional autonomy for South Sudan (1972-1983). It was the first time Southerners had ruled themselves by themselves. It also showed that South Sudan is not less diverse than the whole country. During self-rule, the notion that Southerners constitute a homogeneous bloc, as was the case during the war, came under challenge. During the war, it was taken for granted that Southerners constituted one bloc, being ethnically and culturally different from the North. However, when they attained power for 11 years, some Southerners started to complain about injustices meted out by their own brethren.

(g) The stage of the abrogation of the Addis Ababa Accord and the second war (1983-1985, 1985-1989, 1989-2005). During the first part of this stage, Southern frustration and loss of trust between the South and the North had reached its climax. The events that took place nurtured the feeling of injustice and in the process gave birth to the demands of Southerners to get their rights that would guarantee them a better future, politically, economically and socially. What were these Southern demands?

EVOLUTION OF SOUTHERNERS’ DEMANDS

Southerners started with simple demands limited to the civil service. Firstly, they asked for equal wages between the South and the North as Southerners received less wages than Northerners for the same jobs. That was during colonialism, especially in the 1940s and the early 1950s. They asked for a fair share in civil service during the Sudanization stage in 1955. When 800 jobs were Sudanized, Southerners asked for 40 jobs but they were given only 6 jobs. The common characteristic of these demands was that they were confined to civil service though in the 1950s, they were coupled with some political demands. Then came the demand for participation at the political level. This started with the talk about provision of guarantees that would ensure South Sudan would not be put at a disadvantage by the unity of the two parts of the country because education was hardly available in South Sudan. In the 1950s, Southern politicians came to call for the implementation of federation as the best solution to the problems of government. However, the call was met with fierce opposition by the successive national governments as they equated federation with separation.

The first time the idea of self-determination was put forth was in late 1964, after the October Revolution, by the Southern Front, as the Anyanya came to call for separation since 1963 whereas other Southerners, like Santino Deng and Phelmon Majok, had been calling for centralized unity. The Southern Front believed that the only democratic way to reconcile all these views was through the exercise of self-determination so that the people of South Sudan could choose the system they deemed appropriate for themselves. The Southern Front expressed its demand for self-determination at the Round Table Conference in 1965 but it was totally rejected by the Northern parties who were acting as one bloc in that conference.

The period of autonomous rule (1972-1983) was the zenith of the Southerners commitment to the unity of the country, and it can be termed as the golden era of unity. It was the first time that the Southerners became associated with unity and were involved in its defence. This underscores the organic relationship between participation in government and defending that government. Southerners at that time were the most vocal in defending unity. They glorified unity at every public occasion to the extent that oilfields, banks and squares were named unity. Even leaders of the Anyanya maintained that Nimeiri was the best president they had ever got and that he was God-given. They were the same persons who before Addis Ababa Accord, stated publicly that “the best Arab is the dead one”. The Sudanese opposition at that time (the National Front) was active against the ruling regime. However, despite all this, it did not hold a different view with regards to unity. Therefore, we can say that both the government and the opposition were congruent on the unity of Sudan.

From the aforementioned, we conclude that Southerners were calling for just representation which grew from equality of wages, through to guarantees up to federation. The designation of war as being against Arabism and Islam was a mere reaction and not an original position as explained above by Father Satrinino with regard to separation. The demand for the right of self-determination by Southerners emerged at a later stage in the 1960s as an inevitable result of the harsh policies of the central government at that time vis-à-vis the Southern demands.

A CRACK IN SOUTHERN UNITY

The period of self-rule in South Sudan had proved wrong the theory that the Southern problem was against the Arabs and that Southerners represent a cohesive bloc united by one culture and one political orientation. It was proved wrong during that period by the demand of the Equatorians in 1982 for the expulsion from Equatoria of non-Equatorian Southerners, a process known as Kokra in the Bari language. Eventually, non-Equatorian Southerners were forced to relocate and some of them died en route due to adverse climatic conditions. However, the Arabs were not expelled, so the Arabs had become closer to the Kokorists than the other Southerners from the regions of Bahr El Ghazal and Upper Nile. Therefore, portraying the problem as only between the North and the South is grossly inaccurate as there are differences among Southerners themselves. So, within the framework of the referendum, we should tackle the relations between the South and the North as well as the relations among Southerners.

The rationale of the agreement is the ending of the war and that any of the two options (unity or separation) will result in the sustainability of peace. It follows that if we revert to war, this means that the purpose of the agreement is defeated. Therefore, the concern should not be only about the conduct of the referendum as if the separation of South Sudan or unity oof Sudan were the end of the problem. The question which deserves our profound thinking is whether our choice would achieve the required peace, be it South-South peace or South-North peace. Regrettably enough, the same mistakes which led to Kokra in 1982, are being replicated by the present government of South Sudan led by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). It will be remembered that the advocates of Kokra were speaking about the hegemony of a certain tribe over power in the South. Their leader, Joseph Lagu, published a booklet containing tables showing the number of ministers and directors-general at the ministries from that tribe compared to the other tribes of South Sudan. He came to the conclusion that the said tribe exercised hegemony and marginalized the other tribes. Such a booklet can now be written much more easily and more clearly than that of the Kokra in 1982. Therefore, when we speak of self-determination for South Sudan, it is important to know it is a destination of the people and the unity of Southerners must be guaranteed in this respect.

The lesson to be learnt from the experience of self-rule is that Southerners must sit down to discuss their affairs and agree on the future of South Sudan regardless of the outcome of the referendum, as banking on the theory of common foreign enemy is no longer useful. This theory, though effective in whipping up emotions for ephemeral support, it cannot withstand the test of reality. Separation, if it is the option, is not meant to get rid of the North, it is rather to get rid of wrong practices which the experience of government in the South has proved can be made by Northerners and Southerners alike. During the last five years, the North has not intervened in the South, despite recurrent accusations that the north is the source of every problem happening in the South. However, the reality is different. Is the North responsible for the rampant corruption in the South? The government of South Sudan received huge funds, but is lack of services in the South a Northern conspiracy? Is denial of democracy in the South a Northern making? We should be more realistic and objective in dealing with our problems and avoid seeking scapegoats for our failures. Countries are not built by running away from reality, but rather by confronting it. There are the experiences of other nations we can draw lessons from. In May 1947, the Indian Subcontinent (Pakistan and India) was on the threshold of independence. Pakistan separated from India on the grounds that it was an Islamic country different from the Hindu India. However, religious homogeneity did not prevent the separation of Eastern Pakistan in 1971 in the aftermath of a fierce war to become the present Bangladesh. The same applies to Somalia which does not have any sort of diversity. Somalis hail from one tribe, with one religion and one language. Despite this homogeneity, Somalia has not known stability since the overthrow of Siad Barri’s regime in early 1990s. From all that, it is evident that Southerners should develop their own roadmap for their future an avoid being driven by dictates from overseas. The roadmap is to address the reality in South Sudan, not the imaginations of “the friends”.

SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE SPLM

Self-determination is the democratic means for conclusively settling the issue of unity and separation once and for all. In other words, the right of self-determination could not be exercised in the absence of democracy.

At its inception in 1983, the SPLM declared that it was a unionist movement as stated in its manifesto. This unionist trend received tremendous support in the North which did not expect a Southern movement to demand unity with it. However, the SPLM did not make any effort to enhance this unionist trend on the ground. It has not carried out intensive political work among the fighters to change the separatist conceptions of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) whose elements were drawn from farmers and pastoralists. The main focus was on military work. Moreover, the political struggle was subjected to the military wing and ever since the latter has exercised hegemony over the former. It was the first time that the military guided political thought, unlike the case in all known revolutionary movements.

At that time, the leadership and the army were talking different languages as the majority was supporting separation while the leadership was calling for unity. The SPLA was expressing its separatist tendencies in songs and over Radio SPLA. By the end of the 1980s, it was crystal clear that separatist tendency gained the upper hand but the leadership of the SPLM turned a deaf ear to this. The only leadership body, the Political-Military High Command, had not held a single meeting its formation. For instance, since we (Dr. Riak Machar, James Wani, Daniel Awet, Yousif Kuwa, and I) were appointed to it on 1st July 1986 up to the split in 1991, the Political-Military High Command had never held a meeting. The Southerners in the SPLA were saying that they could not liberate the whole Sudan and could not also offer their children to liberate the North as was the case in the wars in Kurmuk, Geisan and other areas. Moreover, since Northerners had not joined the SPLM/SPLA, they concluded that the Northerners did not approve of the SPLM and its unity enterprise. Such talk was going on within the ranks of the SPLA, which we were hearing as their field commanders. At that time, the number of Northerners from the core North who joined the SPLM was not more than the fingers of two hands. The sizeable number of Northerners came from areas neighbouring the South, like the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile, and this was no real representation of the North. The SPLM did not discuss such issues in order to take decisions because the only institution responsible for that was rendered idle as mentioned above. This was the real cause of the split that took place at Nasir in 1991. We meant to give opportunity to all the members of the SPLM/SPLA to express their views on those crucial issues. Therefore, we believed that the only way to accommodate the unionist and separatist views was through the exercise of the right to self-determination for South Sudan. It is the democratic mechanism which enables people to choose the appropriate system for themselves. Due to the absence of democracy inside the SPLM, the split had to happen then. This is the background for the demand by the SPLM for the right of self-determination.

It is known that the prime mover of any liberation war is the desire to achieve democracy and install a government that is responsive to the interests of the people. The American Revolution against the British in the 18th century was not caused by diversities between the Americans and the Britons. On the contrary, the revolution was waged by people from the Eastern Coast, known as New England, i.e., a version of England proper. They were ethnically the same as the English as both hailed from the Anglo-Saxons. The revolution was waged against Britain because the Americans did not want a remote government that was not responsive to their desires. So, the problem was not about ethnicity or nationalism as the American nationalism emerged later. In the same manner Southerners felt that Khartoum governments were remote from them and not responsive to their demands, so they took up arms against them. The right of self-determination was a desire of the Southern people which the successive governments in Khartoum did not respond to. The right of self-determination, it must be emphasized, could only be exercised under democracy. Two objectives lie at the core of the demands for the right of self-determination. The first is the search for self-expression and self-awareness while the second is the creation of a government that represents the various communities that constitute the population of the country and respond to their demands.

When historical factors or deliberate government policy weakens other communities while allowing only its supporters to organize themselves, as was the case in the post World War 1 Nazi Germany, the foundations of democracy would be weakened. Social diversity is a sociological factor that is fundamental for democratic rule. Accordingly, the government in the South should be representative of all communities in the South in order to be acceptable to all. I believe that the same questions of diversity raised between the North and the South would also be raised with the same force if the South separates because separation would not do away with diversity.

THE SUDANESE CONSENSUS ON SELF-DETERMINATION

The first agreement on self-determination between the government and the SPLM was made in January 1992 in Frankfurt, Germany. It was between the SPLM-Nasir and the Salvation government. Then recognition of self-determination by others followed. The two factions of the SPLM agreed on it in Abuja in 1993. This resulted in division between William Nyuon and Dr. John Garang over this issue as the former agreed to self-determination while the latter favoured unity. In 1994, Umma Party and SPLM-Torit signed the Chukudum agreement which included recognition of self-determination. In 1995, the Asmara Declaration also incorporated self-determination as all parties under the banner of the National Democratic Alliance adopted this right. Thus all the Sudanese political forces agree on self-determination for South Sudan and no party can deny recognition of self determination. Therefore, it has become an acquired right for South Sudan and no body can deny the South exercising this right, no matter whichever party is in power if they honour agreements.

SELF-DETERMINATION IN THE CPA

The right of self-determination is not a mere date, when due, people go to vote and everything will be over. Those who called for the right of self-determination did so with a vision that the people would have to be made fully aware of the meaning of self-determination and the consequences of each of the two options so that they make an informed choice. We must explain to the people these two options: why unity option and why separation option. When the CPA dealt with the right of self-determination, it mentioned specific things which must be realized before referendum. First, the self-determination in the CPA was an attempt to break the deadlock over the issue of separation of religion from the state or the relation between religion and the state. So the CPA stipulated that Northerners shall have the right to apply Islamic Sharia in the North provided that Southerners shall have the right to self-determination. Therefore, the call for a secular state as the only condition for the realization of unity implies a call for re-negotiating the agreement as the two parties had already agreed that the North applies Sharia while the South applies laws that are derived from the people’s consensus and customs including religious beliefs. The CPA has never provided for secularism, the word “secular” is not mentioned in the whole agreement. Second, the agreement was designed for the SPLM to rule the South single-handedly to give it full opportunity to put in practice its ideas to prepare the ground for either equitable unity with the North or separation on a solid foundation. Third, the two parties agreed to work together to achieve the unity of the country and to make it attractive to Southerners. There are certain procedures stipulated by the agreement to realize this which will be mentioned later.

What is unique to the CPA compared to similar agreements in the world is that agreement on self-determination was made without having a party standing for the other option, which is separation. However, the agreement does not deny others the right to advocate for separation. Any party, group or individual, other than the SPLM and the National Congress Party, has full right under the CPA to work for any of the two options.

TWO PROJECTS ABANDONED IN MACHAKOS

Based on the aforementioned, the project of the SPLM to build the ‘New Sudan’ was abandoned in Machakos as secularism represents the core of the concept of ‘New Sudan’. In Machakos Protocol, the SPLM sacrificed the ‘New Sudan’ and chose self-determination. The SPLM agreed that the North which accounts for two thirds of the country be governed by Sharia and this means that two thirds of the country are outside the umbrella of secularism. It is clear that the ‘New Sudan’ project was abandoned. Somebody may argue that this was only a temporary abandonment. Such an argument is not true because the unity option of the referendum is actually accepting the sustainability of the CPA. This agreement can only be amended by the approval of the two parties before the approval of three quarters of the National Legislature. In other words, if we are to introduce secularism, the agreement has to be amended which in turn requires the approval of the NCP, which is out of question. Similarly, the ‘civilizational project’ was also abandoned in Machakos as it sought to apply Sharia all over the country and then extend it beyond Sudan. If the Sharia were to be applied in South Sudan, the agreement must be amended and this requires the approval of the SPLM, a very distant dream even to the most indulgent optimist.

THE GROUND IS NOT SET FOR THE REFERENDUM

The present environment is not conducive for the conduct of the referendum as the transitional period is drawing to a close while the Government of Southern Sudan and the Government of National Unity have not fulfilled the requirements necessary for the exercise of self-determination. Article 7-1 of the Power Sharing Protocol of the CPA sets out that the two parties agreed to initiate national reconciliation and healing process throughout the country as part of the peace building process to be led by the GoNU. Up to now, after five years since the CPA was signed, people have not seen the two partners together enlightening them about the agreement in such a way as to realize the hopes of the people and make unity attractive. On the contrary, the opposite took place. The SPLM succeeded in mobilizing the people in South Sudan against the NCP by portraying it as an enemy rather than a partner to the extent that any one in the South who speaks of the NCP as a partner is branded as a traitor. This runs counter to the stipulations of the CPA. Another matter ignored by the two partners was stipulated in sub-section 3-12-2 of the Power Sharing Protocol of the CPA, that is, the two partners undertake to ensure that their members and institutions under their control abide by and implement the provisions of the agreement. How many members of the NCP and the SPLM are committed to the agreement and its implementation? Thus, the two partners have not behaved as partners as provided for by the agreement and also have not done any joint work to make unity attractive. The opposite took place: polarization.

The SPLM which has ruled the South for five years has not come up with tangible achievements that would suggest the realization of its ideas of ‘New Sudan’. If it was in possession of a project and political programme, that was a golden opportunity to implement them. However, that has not happened and South Sudan has hardly seen a worthy achievement by the SPLM, despite the flow of huge funds to GoSS. The share from oil revenue alone amounted to more than $ 10 billion, besides the share of the South in the national budget allocations in addition to the assistance provided by sisterly and friendly countries and peace funds. Actually, the South has hardly witnessed development. It has instead reeled under rampant corruption, insecurity and incessant intervention in the affairs of the State governments. For instance, 90% of the general budget is expended in Juba while the rest of the South’s ten states receive only 10%. On the political side, there is lack of a democratic environment for political parties to exercise their political activities. As for security, insecurity prevails and during the last elections, the rigging of the elections by the SPLM was exposed. The SPLM, by force of arms, rigged the elections and imposed a certain reality, a matter which has brought adverse results including the mutiny of a number of SPLA commanders who are currently fighting GoSS in protest against election rigging. All these factors render the ground not conducive for a free and fair referendum.

THE DOUBLE-SPEAK OF THE SPLM

It is indisputable that both partners to the CPA made mistakes and failures regarding the implementation of the CPA. However, what draws attention is the fact that the SPLM insists on blaming its partner for all the setbacks. Throwing blame on the NCP was not accidental but a well considered SPLM strategy from the outset of the implementation of the agreement. In less than a month since the GoNU took the oath of office, the SPLM started accusing the NCP of not implementing the agreement! Hereunder is an example of this.

On 25th September, 2005, we took the oath of office as new ministers in the GoNU. In October, the Bar Association elections were conducted. In preparation for this election, the then head of SPLM’s Northern Sector, Abdelaziz Adam Alhilu, recommended to the leadership that the SPLM should ally with the opposition, “Democratic list”, in those elections. Alhilu said the SPLM could not ally with the NCP for two reasons. The first was that the NCP had not implemented the agreement and the second was that the NCP was a political outcast. A heated discussion arose in the meeting. The most important point raised in that meeting was that the CPA states that the Bar Association nominates two of its members to the High Judicial Council and that it was impertinent that the opposition fills the two seats in such a sensitive body. Another point was that the SPLM was a partner of the NCP in the implementation of the agreement. Therefore, it would be natural for it to ally with the NCP. Moreover, if it were to be accepted that the SPLM should not side with the NCP, why not run in the elections of the Bar Association alone? How can the SPLM ally with the opposition while it was in the government? Ultimately, the meeting resolved that the SPLM allies itself with the NCP on the grounds that it was a partner of the SPLM to the CPA. The question here is: how did the Northern Sector official come to the conclusion that the NCP had not implemented the agreement in less than a month since the government took office?

Days passed by and there was a shift in position of the leadership; those who called for cooperation with the NCP to ensure the smooth implementation of the agreement were branded of being separatists lacking concern for the cause of freedoms in the North and solely focused on maintaining good relations with the NCP to secure smooth separation. The duplicity of the SPLM by putting one foot in the opposition and the other in the government had become the norm. It was no secret that the SPLM ignored the national role it could have played in the North. Its ministers in the GoNU, except for one or two, were not active and little heard of, and the First Vice President of the Republic, the second most senior person in the state, abandoned the duties of this office and marooned himself in South Sudan. The participation of the SPLM in the GoNU was mainly to give it opportunity to prove itself as a national party. That was a golden opportunity for the SPLM to play a national role that could have enhanced its call for the unity of the country. This shift in position was not to serve the interests of the SPLM, let alone the interests of the people. It was to serve the interests of others who were bent on regime change. However, when they failed to achieve that through the opposition alliance in the elections, they shifted to plan (B) whose actual implementation has started immediately after the general elections. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the very people who were unrivaled in their enthusiasm for advocating unity are now equally fervent in their call for separation of South Sudan! They talk about separation and come up with justifications for the change of heart. They find a lending hand in this hypocrisy from some Northerners.

It is mindboggling to hear people, particularly Northern parties, claim that the uncompromising position of the NCP motivated the SPLM to opt for separation. First, if the position of the SPLM on unity was a matter of principle, then it should not be affected by the position of the NCP or others. Second, these Northern parties which now find excuse for the separatist position of the SPLM forget or feign forgetting that they mainly allied with the SPLM to topple the NCP. Then how can the SPLM change its principled position in reaction to the tactics of the NCP which was from the outset its opponent if not its enemy? Third, unity of Sudan was the only issue that had brought the SPLM and the Northern parties together to forge an alliance. So, if the SPLM had turned separatist, there ceases to be a common ground between these former allies. Fourth, did the SPLM think that by signing the CPA, the NCP would concede the dismantling of the Salvation regime to make unity attractive? It seems that the hostility towards the NCP has made some people oblivious to the ABC of politics. The SPLM should bear its share of blame for not making unity attractive during the interim period. Most importantly, the SPLM owes it to the people of South Sudan to explain to them how it claims to lead the separatist camp now whereas it been bragging and boasting that its first bullets were shot at the Southern separatists before fighting the enemy in Khartoum.

We now move to the much trumpeted warning that the option of unity is tantamount to Southerners accepting to become second class citizens. The quotation from Dr John Garang reproduced above makes reference to this point. In reply to that, it must be noted that the unity option enshrined in the CPA, affirms acceptance of the sustainability of the arrangements set out by the agreement concerning the system of rule in the South and at the national level. This has been provided for in the national constitution and the constitution of Southern Sudan. In other words, the South retains at its present semi-autonomous status and will simultaneously have a sizeable share in the national government which now stands at 30%. Therefore, the talk that Southerners, by choosing unity, are opting to be second class citizens, implies that by having accepted the CPA from the outset, the Southerners have settled to be second class citizens, as the country had been run during the last five years in accordance with it.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

There are certain issues which must be settled ahead of the referendum. The issues of freedoms, security situation and creation of Southern consensus concerning the future of the South must all be settled ahead of the referendum. Article (7) of the South Sudan Referendum Act 2010 provides for the requirements of a conducive environment for the conduct of the referendum. Article (7) includes seven items in this regard. All this is to safeguard the freedom for the people of South Sudan to express their opinions regarding the two options. The various levels of government should work to bring about a conducive environment including the security situation and the provision of freedom of expression for all the people as well as freedom of assembly and movement. Added to this is the involvement of IGAD countries, its partners, organizations of civil society and registered political parties in addition to registration of voters and raising their awareness and ensuring their right to vote in a secret ballot without intimidation. All this could hardly be seen on the ground. Therefore, unless these circumstances are redressed, conducting the referendum at this time would be a violation of the agreement itself. The agreement stipulates that the choice shall be made consciously and the non-availability of the right circumstances for the conduct of the referendum will open the door wide for challenging the result, whether by Northerners or Southerners or even by others. The referendum must be conducted to the satisfaction of all so that the result could be acceptable to all. There is no sense in conducting a referendum whose result will be questionable or disputed. It is known that the ultimate goal of the agreement is to realize sustainable peace, therefore, if the agreement ends up in a situation that may ignite war once more, we would have compromised the goal of the agreement. The target of the debate on unity and separation is the Southern citizen, therefore, we must approach him/her, dialogue with him/her in order to persuade him/her. But how can we approach the citizen when he/her does not enjoy the freedom of choice. Moreover, there is absence of a democratic climate which allows people to advocate for the choice they believe in. From the experience of the last elections, citizens are aware that the SPLM would do what it likes. Since it had rigged the elections with impunity, it can likewise rig the referendum. Unless these adverse circumstances are reversed, the great efforts exerted by all political forces for a free debate will absolutely futile. Therefore, it is necessary that all efforts be streamlined to produce a conducive environment for the referendum. This is the sole guarantee for a free, fair and transparent referendum that will meet the acceptance of the people. All should look for the right procedures that will bring about the conducive atmosphere necessary for the conduct of the referendum. If there is good faith, the remaining time would be enough for preparing the ground for the referendum hence enabling the people to freely express their opinion without coercion or intimidation. The present circumstances do not meet the requirement of a free, fair and transparent referendum that would be to the satisfaction of all. Within the drive for producing the conducive atmosphere for a free, fair and independent referendum in South Sudan, the following three issues must be addressed:

1- provision of freedoms and democratic action

As mentioned previously, the right of self-determination cannot be exercised in the absence of democracy. Since democracy is non-existent in South Sudan, freedoms should be provided and political forces be allowed to participate in the referendum under a healthy democratic environment. The SPLM is not expected to do this on its own initiative, so it should be pressured into doing it by all political forces and the civil society.

2- provision of security

The security situation in South Sudan is unstable for various reasons, most importantly, tribes are fighting each other, the SPLA is fighting against the civil population in some areas and more seriously, some SPLA commanders rebelled against their army after the elections and they are now fighting GoSS. This security problem must be addressed.

3- The South – South dialogue

The South is for all Southerners and should not be the private domain of one party. Accordingly, all people have their concerns about its future. Under the current circumstances, all those concerned with the interests of Southerners are worried over the absence of consultation regarding issues of concern, top among which is how to approach the referendum with unity of purpose. Therefore, it is crucial to hold the South-South dialogue ahead of the referendum in order to reach agreement on the post-referendum future of the South irrespective of whether the choice is unity or separation. This dialogue should involve all Southern parties, organizations of civil society and public figures. A number of crucial issues must be agreed upon particularly if the choice is separation. These issues include transforming the present regional constitution into a national one, ensuring that the South will not be used to destabilize its neighbours including the North, not allowing any foreign military base to be established in South Sudan, a code of honour for provision of freedoms and democracy, neutrality and professionalism of the civil service, etc. South – South dialogue would be the safety valve which would slam the door in the face of people with hidden agendas concerning the referendum and the future of South Sudan.

Conclusion

The fundamental issue currently is that under the present adverse circumstances in South Sudan, there would be no way for a free, fair and transparent referendum. Therefore it would be in the interest of the advocates of unity and separation alike to unify their ranks and join efforts to impose the favourable climate for the dissemination of their ideas about unity or separation so that they reach the Southern citizen, the voter in this referendum. It is also in the interest of both camps to ensure a free, fair and transparent referendum in order to make its result acceptable to all, hence, obtain recognition of the international community. This entails that the pre- referendum arrangements must be discussed in order to reach consensus about them and thereby ensure equal opportunity for the two camps of unity and separation. If the two parties to the agreement possess enough political will, the required favourable circumstances for the referendum can be created within two months. The South – South dialogue is crucial to the referendum on par with the provision of security, freedoms and democratic environment in South Sudan. As there are differences between the North and the South, there are also differences within the South itself. Therefore, if separation occurs, the situation of Southern differences must be dealt with prudently.

The author is the leader of SPLM-DC and former Sudan’s foreign minister

The views expressed in the ’Analyses’ section are solely the opinions of the writers. The veracity of any claims made are the responsibility of the author not Sudan Tribune.

If you want to submit an opinion piece please email it to contact@sudantribune.com

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 5 September 04:23, by James Okuk Solomon
The crucial question I would ask Dr Lam Akol here is: What would be a guarantee that the environment may be made conducive by the CPA ’s partners to conduct a fair, free and transparent referendum for Southerners as desired since the last five years and more months have offered some proves that those partners are not interested in joint and full implementation of the CPA to its desired end? Isn’t the delay of the plebiscite (till the pending issues that affects the success of the referendum are resolved ) in the advantage of the unionists only since the status quo has been unity of the Sudan? Also the critical question I may ask those who will not agree with Dr Akol’s position is this: What will be the use of unrecognized referendum full of quarrels and possibility of third war between Khartoum and Juba? Conclusion of another peace agreement with NCP and Northerners?

I am looking forward to get some convincing answers here, otherwise I may consider viable, my position that advices for the postponement of the referendum until 9th January 2012 and then go for war of unilateral declaration of independence of South Sudan after that if nothing good comes out in regards to fair, free and transparent referendum with recognizable end-result. This position is a middle-way compromise to allow the unionists to enjoy the status quo for a further one year only of the CPA extended life-span but at the end of that year to also allow the separatists to start enjoying the dignity of the independence of South Sudan.

Okuki James and Lam Akol: The same thing! 5 September 05:05, by Grader
Who are you kidding?

Lam writes, disciple (Lam’s) number one comments!

What a joke?

You’re doomed to fail. The only forum left for you is Sudantribune, there is no one interested in listening to your ancient thoughts. The fact that Lam resorted to sites such as Tribune and Southsudannation shows how desperate he is ...

You are another failed self proclaimed leader in a long list

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 6 September 05:04, by Paul Ongee
Ya Lam Akol,

Why do you force yourself to be a leader while in essence you do not even have one leadership quality. Who told you that South Sudan hasn’t yet gone with or without holding free and fair Referendum? Don’t you know that SPLM/A is ever ready to deal with any potential odds? Don’t you know that SPLM/A will change you and NCP at any cost for the sake of freedom and human dignity? Remember that Sudan will never be the same again whether traitors like you or your likes exist or not.

Why did you wanna be a separatist yesterday (1991), a unionist today, and again a separatist tomorrow? Do you think this is the typical political leadership that South Sudan is yearning for on your mind? The Ph.D of confusion is not holding water any more man. You are basically living in 1991when you came to Khartoum begging for getting Fashoda Agreement signed in order to be a leader in the South.

A real Ph.D holder does not have to beg for political leadership from the common enemy that you have been initially fighting against for your freedom. NCP is certainly cutting financial support which is based solely on signed "confusion agreement" with you because you failed to confuse Southerners since the formation of your party last June 2009.

I know you’ are planning to come back to SPLM as usual believe me or not because of your first time criticism directed against NCP last Tuesday August 31, 2010 when you addressed the participants during closing session of the scientific conference on the self-determination for Southern Sudan and the popular consultation for Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile at Sharjah Hall in Khartoum. You said you would accept the result of the referendum if Southerners voted for separation.

Just plan to come back. Khartoum is not your real political/biological brother however hard you try to be one of them by simply getting your b...t stamped for conversion to Islam. Instead, get their b..ts stamped too to be Christians or just hurry to get your freedom and dignity in January 2011as the ruling Islamic elite got theirs in January 1956. For how long will you keep changing your political color for self-interest ya Lam Akol?

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 6 September 16:20, by James Okuk Solomon
By Dr Lam: There is no guarantee for anything in politics. My argument is that we need a free, fair and transparent referendum so that its outcome is not subject to dispute. A disputed referendum is a recipe for war, which no sensible person wants. People never make obvious mistakes so as to go to war, war comes because it is inevitable! I do not think it will be wise for Southerners to go to war if what they want can be achieved peacefully. This is exactly what is offered by this referendum. Most of, if not all, the requirements to create a conducive environment for the conduct of the referendum (Article 7 of the Act) are in the hands of the Government of Southern Sudan. These include, provision of security and ensuring a democratic atmosphere for campaigning. Does it need much time for GOSS to provide these? It can do so straightaway if they are keen that the referendum should not be postponed. There is no shortcut to providing a conducive atmosphere because this is the essence of free choice.

I have no problem with a definitive postponement if it is absolutely necessary to ensure better preparation for the referendum provided that it is agreed upon by all the political parties, especially the Southern parties, and comes about because of technical matters brought forward by the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission. After all the Referendum Act should have been passed by July 2008, according to the CPA, instead it was enacted in December 2009! The problem with UDI is that it is ultra vires, that is, illegal and the new state may not find full regional and international recognition. It will be a great leap into the dark for the South to take that path. The best for us is to tell GOSS to double up on providing level ground for all parties and individuals to campaign in the referendum. Regards. Lam.

Dear Dr Lam,

Your answer is much apprenticed because it is short and to the point of the questions I raised about your articulate article on the challenges facing South Sudan referendum . I hope Southern Sudan political forces will manage to dialogue it out with the SPLM and NCP soon so that the referendum is saved from collapse.

Indeed, under the current situation in both Juba and Khartoum, the referendum has become a dilemma of "peace-war", and it may be lost if the dilemma is not defused urgently. It is my prayer that things end up well as the Indian proverb says " it is not over till it is over."

With regards,

Dr James Okuk

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 5 September 05:42, by murlescrewed
Dr Lam Akol add nothing new to what is already known. His article is heavy on criticism of SPLM and its running of South. He is clearly trying to stoke and rekindle old tribal animosities in the South and trying to draw attention to the diversity of opinion in South. This message is being particularly directed at Equatorians who have come to the realization that the entire SPLM-DC enterprise is fake and not helpful to South’s future as one united country.

We have to careful with Lam Akol. He is known to be on the record that his entire objective is to bring down the what he perceives to be Dinka hegemony. If anything like this exist, it is only in Dr Akol mind and cannot be sustained under scrutiny. It is therefore advisable that all readers are careful to being deceived. This is more like an SPLM-DC manifesto meant to appeal to the worse in us: tribal sentiments. It does not add to the debate and actually take South a step backward.

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 6 September 04:01, by makino
Dr Lam Akol & your Self Determination case, I would like to respond to you squarely as an elder and a politician. I must also bring to your attention that I am a young son of South Sudan, well informed and political pro. First of all I appreciate the cronology of Policatical events in the Sudan and those particularly pertaining to the South not ignoring your points for the case of Self Determination. The latest will be the main point of my response in dispute of yours.

It is not to be ignored that there were and still are some problems in the SPLM which I can put to issue of good political management thus making some people comfortable and others to complain from all tribes of South Sudan; and I am saying this from direct experience with truht not experience with distortion as of your case.

From the start of your long article the arguments have been good that one would think you have a genuine reason as to why the ground is not right for Self Determination. When you joined SPLM for the second time you knew that it abondoned the New Sudan project at Machakos and took self determination for the South as you said and that the NCP has abandoned the Civilisation program based on Sharia law. Then when leadership crisis with (yours) SPLM surfaced you chose to leave and became NCP pro then turned anti SPLM, anti South and pro Shiluk only and forgot your capacity as a valueble Southerner and elder who should preach peace and govern well as shown before in some of your positions, you should have only been patient to get what you want through elections either within SPLM or outside but not tricky distorter.

To conclude, and I am sure many will perscieve my point in different ways. You only stated that the ground is not right for the self determination just because you are not ruling the South or the Sudan, or you might be having an illusional alternative to the Sudan problem since you sincerely agreed that you were one of the initiators of Southern Self Determination but are now rejecting it and banking on trible issues which the South can solve alone, at the same time you seem to approve in disguise the Civilisation program spearheaded by NCP in the Sudan. So please Dr. Akol take one side and not tricky aimed at confusing not well informed Southerners to abondon their hard fought right. We the Youth are united behind it as Southerners and we don’t mind the old wounds between our elders and you should lay back. We are going to fight for it if rigged till independence then come to solve the minor Southern trible issues together. So you and other disgruntled elders should lay back for now or for good!

Acholkina John Malony.

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 6 September 05:04, by Paul Ongee
Ya Lam Akol,

Why do you force yourself to be a leader while in essence you do not even have one leadership quality. Who told you that South Sudan hasn’t yet gone with or without holding free and fair Referendum? Don’t you know that SPLM/A is ever ready to deal with any potential odds? Don’t you know that SPLM/A will change you and NCP at any cost for the sake of freedom and human dignity? Remember that Sudan will never be the same again whether traitors like you or your likes exist or not.

Why did you wanna be a separatist yesterday (1991), a unionist today, and again a separatist tomorrow? Do you think this is the typical political leadership that South Sudan is yearning for on your mind? The Ph.D of confusion is not holding water any more man. You are basically living in 1991when you came to Khartoum begging for getting Fashoda Agreement signed in order to be a leader in the South.

A real Ph.D holder does not have to beg for political leadership from the common enemy that you have been initially fighting against for your freedom. NCP is certainly cutting financial support which is based solely on signed "confusion agreement" with you because you failed to confuse Southerners since the formation of your party last June 2009.

I know you’ are planning to come back to SPLM as usual believe me or not because of your first time criticism directed against NCP last Tuesday August 31, 2010 when you addressed the participants during closing session of the scientific conference on the self-determination for Southern Sudan and the popular consultation for Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile at Sharjah Hall in Khartoum. You said you would accept the result of the referendum if Southerners voted for separation.

Just plan to come back. Khartoum is not your real political/biological brother however hard you try to be one of them by simply getting your b...t stamped for conversion to Islam. Instead, get their b..ts stamped too to be Christians or just hurry to get your freedom and dignity in January 2011as the ruling Islamic elite got theirs in January 1956. For how long will you keep changing your political color for self-interest ya Lam Akol?

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 6 September 11:15, by Flora Tong
Regardless of your views about Dr. Lam Akol, in this article and for heaven sake he is much better that the SPLM Minister of Oil Lual Achuek! And some other SPLM whom we “trust”. Khartoum is a temporary home for Dr. Lam the same way it is for thousands Southern Sudanese. Tell me Southerner who doesn’t have a relative in the North. We all have relatives in the North. At least Dr. Lam is better than those who have their families in Australia and all over the world.

For those who do not respect different views and before you start abusing me, I heard it all in this website when the view is different, people start using bad words that looks like them express what they really are!

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 6 September 12:07, by Akolde Nhiak Jinub
Dear Dr. Lam,

Many and I know that you are a Southerner by all nature given whether birth, color, soul or spirit, but your biggest problem, is your thirst for power every time South Sudan has at a critical time of success. You are always there to either abort it or smash it completely.

This article you have written even before I would go through it all, is a thorough sad true side of history that our northern and Arab brothers have been subjected us to, when we are people with distinct history and background. Africans who won’t be subdued to accept someone religion and culture.

Indeed, we have endured the most brutal and ruthless Arabs treatment on the face of this planet, ever seen in the world under successive regimes centralized in Khartoum.

It is time we part ways comes January 2011, whether in fair, free and transparent process or anything that will see us form our own state on earth. We are tired, thousands of generations have suffered enough and this must stop with us now. Not beyond January 2011.

Think Dr. Lam and come back home. You are our prodigal son of South Sudan though....

Akolde, Rumbek

South Sudan Referendum: First things first 6 September 13:38, by James Okuk Solomon
Reply by Dr Lam Akol, see

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
Cambridge, Mass.

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.

In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.

Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.

Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.

For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.

Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.

African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.

Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.

So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”

About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic."

SPLM and the imperative of internal dialogue

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

The Imperatives of Internal Dialogue: The SPLM and Returning to the Drawing Board
Thursday 24 December 2009.
By Elwathig Kameir

December 23, 2009 — As I underlined in my open letter to Dr. Ghazi Salaheldin (Alhadath, Alrayaam, July 2009), national duty binds both partners in power, the NCP and SPLM, by virtue of their leadership of this historically most critical phase in the history of modern Sudan, as well as all the rest of the political forces, to initiate serious, sincere, and open dialogue regarding the equation of unity and separation. I also called on the ruling partners to undertake an objective assessment of where each party had succeeded, or failed, in the implementation of programs and polices in order to render unity “attractive” as obligated by both the CPA and the Interim Constitution. It is imperative for each partner to clearly define its position on the unity of the country, earnestly discuss the obstacles and impediments standing in the way, and ensure the required guarantees are in place. Otherwise, both partners will be held responsible for pushing southerners to vote in favor of separation, and thus should be prepared to endure the implications of their respective policies on the fate of the Sudan and its people. In reading the position of each partner on the unity of the country, I drew on an anecdote made by the late leader Dr. John Garang in his assessment of a certain comrade’s position regarding the Nasir split in which he said “This comrade has one foot with the splinters and the other with us, but his “big” foot is with the splinters!” (Abidjan, February 1992) Similarly, it seems for the attentive observer that each of the partners has one foot in the position of unity, while the other is in the position of separation, but they both have their “big” foot in the position of separation!

The symposium on ‘Unity and Self-determination” jointly organized by the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) and the Future Trends Foundation in Khartoum (2-3 November 2009), probably marked the first serious endeavor to explore and gauge the intentions of the ruling partners on the question of unity and engage them in a meaningful debate with the objective of, at least, reversing the situation by moving the “big” foot to the position of unity. The symposium was organized at a time when both feet of the SPLM almost swayed to the position of separation following the statements of the Movement’s Chairman at a Cathedral in Juba (November 1st 2009), which sparked a surge of violent verbal exchanges between leading figures on each side of the partnership. The skirmish further widened the gap between the two partners and precipitated a tense and volatile political atmosphere ridden with the exchange of mutual accusations, as each partner blamed the other for leading the country towards separation. In an appreciated attempt for bridging the gap and bringing back the partners on track in order to complete the implementation of the CPA, a necessary task for maintaining the country’s stability, sustaining peace, and paving the ground for a peaceful exchange of power, the organizers of the symposium invited two distinguished leaders, at the political and executive levels, from both sides (Ghazi Salaheldin and Deng Alor), to engage in the debate on the equation of unity vs. separation. Dr. Francis Deng was also invited in a bid to provide the participants, particularly the two partners, with a vision for reconciling unity and self-determination, which might assist them in narrowing their differences in a way that would have a positive impact on the results of the forthcoming referendum. All this effort, however, did not succeed in averting the confrontation and the strongly-worded exchange of criticisms, between the Foreign Minister and the Presidential advisor, in which Deng Alor heatedly called for a “peaceful divorce” between the north and the south. For him, the insistence on preserving the Islamic laws had destroyed the last hope in keeping the country united.

Against this backdrop, in my opinion the most important outcome of the symposium exercise is that it has demonstrated the urgent need for diligent study, painstaking research, and meaningful dialogue on the real dimensions of two options: unity and separation, and the implications of each of them, particularly the deleterious impact of separation, internally and within the ranks of the various political forces, especially the two partners in power. I am inclined to think that dialogue between these forces has to date remained unproductive and fruitless due to the lack of internal strategic discourse, going beyond the mere negotiations over immediate gains of power and wealth, within the structures of these forces. This is why I strongly believe that both the NCP and SPLM are in dire need of serious dialogue and candid discussion within their respective institutions, and amongst the grassroots, in order to make the interaction between them more constructive and effective, and produce fruitful results that would spare our country the evils of wars and disintegration!

This paper argues that such a dialogue denotes a profound challenge, in particular for the SPLM as it prepares itself to face up to two impending momentous events: elections and the self-determination referendum. Dialogue, therefore, remains the most appropriate and only approach for clarifying the Movement’s position on the unity of the country through articulating an unambiguous strategy and political program based on the Manifesto that was approved by the Second National Convention in May 2008.

THE SPLM: WHY INTERNAL DIALOGUE IS NECESSARY?

The SPLM is obliged to immediately initiate internal dialogue, even if it is late, due to a mixed blend of objective (and subjective) factors:

• The vision of the SPLM for the country was stipulated from the beginning, to be the creation of a united Sudan, albeit on new bases: a New Sudan. Since then, the Movement has consistently translated the vision into strategies and policies, even following the adoption of self-determination as a twin objective at the First National Convention in 1994.

• It is the New Sudan vision that has guided the struggle of the Movement since its inception in 1983 against all forms of governments in Khartoum and informed its alliance with the rest of the political forces in the country. The objectives, mission and political program of the SPLM, throughout the period 1983-2005, were all premised on the tenets of this Vision, which also provided the correct tools of analysis that enabled the Movement to successfully diagnose the internal political situation, with both its regional and international ramifications.

• Most importantly, the New Sudan vision remains the source of the growing popular support that the Movement has been able to garner all over the Sudan, particularly in the North. Thus, the membership of the SPLM has a national character and is not restricted to southerners only, but embraced large numbers from the north, the west, the east, and the centre. It also included both those who joined in the armed struggle, and those who opted for political resistance in support of the Movement’s objectives. Indeed, large sectors of the Sudanese see the SPLM as the only organized political force with a clear vision.

• Above all, it is the SPLM that called for the right of self-determination following the Nasir split, and was consequently adopted by the Torit Conference in September 1991 as a negotiation position with the Sudan government, until it was endorsed by the First National Convention in April 1994.

RECONCILING SELF-DETERMINATION WITH UNITY (1983-2005)

However, the Nasir split was not the first rift within the ranks of the SPLM. There are, and have always been, differences. In fact, disagreements have occurred, degenerating into violent confrontations at various historical junctures in the evolution of the SPLM. Thus, the vision of the New Sudan, and the adoption of objectives and programs consistent with it, had its difficulties and troubles in the early days of the Movement. Some leaders of the SPLM and some Anya-Nya Commanders splintered on the grounds of fighting for an independent Southern Sudan. The Nasir episode, however, led the northerners in the SPLM/A to wonder whether the Movement had abandoned its commitment to its long-held objective of the united New Sudan, the very goal that attracted them to the SPLM in the first place. Thus, the northerners felt that they were threatened by the call for self-determination, with the purpose of separation. They were arguing “we joined the SPLM and sacrificed and now people are going in a different direction”. So, they sat together with the late Chairman of the Movement, and some other leaders, during November-December 1994, in a place called, ironically, Jabal Anya-Nya 1, to find an answer for the question then posed; if the southerners separated, then what do we do? In addition to these meetings, the First SPLM/A National Convention sufficiently addressed these fears and confusion through open debate and subsequent resolutions. The Convention also debated all issues of concern to the movement and its future direction, especially in the aftermath of the split of 1991, and correctly addressed the issue of Self-determination as a people’s right that does not contradict the SPLM objective of a united democratic New Sudan, but on the contrary enhances it. It was, thus, resolved in unequivocal terms that the establishment of the New Sudan and the achievement of the right to and exercise of self-determination as two principal objectives of the Movement. Indeed, accurately perceived, the New Sudan can only be achieved through the mechanism of self-determination i.e. through the free will of the Sudanese people.

The late Chairman of the SPLM was forthright in his approach and understanding of the right of self-determination as a tool for achieving “voluntary” unity of the country. In his words “when we talk about self-determination, even in the NDA charters, it is in a very deep sense that the unity of the country, the New Sudan itself, must be achieved through self-determination, by who? By the Sudanese people themselves. So, when people talk about the unity of the Sudan in emotional terms that it is threatened, one begins to wonder whether they mean what they are saying or they know what they are saying”. The ensuing debate during the First Convention, therefore, reaffirmed that the realization of the vision of the New Sudan, brought about either through a combination of armed struggle and urban popular uprisings or a politically negotiated settlement, is key to the attainment of freedom, equality and justice for the Sudanese people. The Convention, thus, put the SPLM on the right path towards achieving the objective of building the democratic New Sudan, and converging with the rest of the political forces in the north. In other words, the 1994 Convention aimed at developing a robust and rejuvenated SPLM/A that is capable of impacting the totality of the situation so as to bring about a fundamental change in the entire country.

Therefore, notwithstanding the adoption of the right of self-determination following the Nasir split in 1991, which also cast doubt on the feasibility and viability of achieving the New Sudan vision, the genuine and sincere dialogue that took place before, during, and in the aftermath of the First Convention, enabled the SPLM leadership to articulate a comprehensive strategy to realize the unity of the Sudan on new bases, which eventually led to the conclusion of the CPA as a major milestone on the road to the New Sudan.

THE SPLM BETWEEN UNITY AND SEPARATION: A CALL FOR DIALOGUE ON STRATEGY

With the commencement of the CPA implementation and the tragic departure of the late Dr. John Garang at the end of July 2005, however, the SPLM orientation, policies, and contradictory statements of its leadership, regarding the unity of the country, in the context of the intense power struggle, have exacerbated the suspicions of the grassroots of Movement’s sincerity and commitment to its declared objective. Besides, in the absence of strategy and lack of clear programs and policies to this effect, the SPLM found itself engulfed with the partner in power in disputes over the spoils of wealth and power, while relied on inertia in dealing with the post-CPA political reality, thus overlooking basic facts on the ground:

To start with, the CPA incorporates several aspects of the New Sudan Vision, as dubbed by the late SPLM Chairman a “Mini-New Sudan”. Although it is essentially a political compromise between the SPLM and the NCP, the Agreement provides us with the required framework for the continued pursuit of the objective of the New Sudan through purely political means as opposed to the pre-CPA combination of military (and political) methods. Thus, the new political reality consequent upon the CPA provides the SPLM with a golden opportunity to translate its vision of the New Sudan into a working political program, and to build alliances with like-minded forces.

The CPA is not merely predicated on trust of the NCP, or other northern political forces. It is premised on the SPLM/A being an equal partner in its implementation. We should not be worried that the NCP might renege on the Agreement, because the SPLM/A will not allow them to. In the past the question was: what will the north do? What will Khartoum give to the south? The question is rather: what can we all do? The creation of the New Sudan in the context of the post-CPA situation will depend on what we all do during the interim period.

The CPA’s “one country-two systems” was modeled on the SPLM proposal of confederal arrangements (Abuja 1993), with the objective of giving a chance for the two partners and the rest of the Sudanese political forces, for that matter, to rethink during the extended interim period how to maintain and sustain the unity of the country in the long run.

The only route for sustaining the unity of the Movement, thus the unity of the Sudan at large, is through genuine adherence to the New Sudan vision at the program and policy levels, and vigorous engagement in national politics. For the aspirants for either unity or separation of the south, their respective objectives would not be met through withdrawal or retreat from the center of power, where the fate of land and people has been, and is determined!

Paradoxically, even the “southern nationalists” would harvest the wind at the end of the day if the SPLM failed in making use of the powers, at the national level, accorded to it by the CPA. This is simply because the self-determination referendum has to pass through the gate of elections. The outcome of those elections would be disastrous for the SPLM, as well as for the cause of the “southern nationalists”, if it failed to secure a comfortable representation in the national parliament. Otherwise, the CPA will turn into Addis Ababa Agreement II.

Elections (Free and Fair), therefore, add yet another national responsibility to the SPLM to initiate a process of national dialogue and political discourse with all the political and social forces. The objective is to arrive at a social contract that encompasses issues of the CPA, national reconciliation and democratic transformation as a basis of national consensus. Indeed, “Nationalism” is not a “northern” phenomenon!

In the context of operationalizing the New Sudan Vision, something that is already long overdue, the SPLM should use Southern Sudan, where it enjoys near total control, to demonstrate how it would go about nationally pursuing the goals of (i) ’Restructuring power’, (ii) ’Democratic Governance and Human Rights’ and (iii) ’Equal and Sustainable Development’.

ISSUES FOR DIALOGUE: A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the signing of the CPA as far as the organizational and institutional aspects of the SPLM are concerned. Most importantly, the SPLM has gained large numbers of members and supporters in the various states of Northern Sudan, including in Darfur. These are supporters whose minds and hearts have become captivated by the New Sudan Vision. The unprecedented reception of the late leader on 8th July 2005 is the best witness for this surge towards the SPLM. Meanwhile, the SPLM ventured into developing its organizational and institutional structures in the process of its transformation from a military and regional movement into a national political entity in the context of the transition from war to peace. The convening of the Second National Convention in May 2008, fourteen years after the first one, left the doors wide open for the participation of SPLM members from all the states in the north, the Northern Sector being represented with one third of the convention’s members totaling over one thousand five hundred.

The Convention presented a long awaited opportunity to which the movement’s grassroots, especially supporters of unity whether northerners or southerners, aspired in order to participate in a serious and transparent dialogue on the critical issues related to the evolution of the movement and its transition from a military-based organization to a political party, that can lead economic, social and cultural transformation, and achieve the country’s unity on a new bases, all this in the shadow of a general discomfort due to the ambiguity in the position of the leaders of the movement regarding the unity of the country. In reality, the organized membership of the movement and its supporters (who have given it the benefit of the doubt) are somewhat confused since the “ghost” of separation keeps them awake as they ask: Has the movement deserted the vision of the New Sudan? They joined the Movement in the quest for a new united Sudan, yet they find themselves as if swimming against the tide. Contrary to expectations, however, the agenda of the Convention and its outcomes proved disappointing. The Convention was successful in settling the internal power struggle in an amicable and democratic fashion and was able to preserve the Movement’s unity and consolidate its leadership, in addition to endorsing the constitution. However, notwithstanding the consensus on the vision of the New Sudan and though the Manifesto was passed by acclamation, yet the Vision was not translated into strategies, or detailed programs and policies, that could guide daily political activity and on which the Movement’s electoral manifesto or program could be based. Until the writing of the present paper, none of these documents has been circulated for discussion and dialogue, nor has the National Liberation Council been convened to approve strategies, programs, and policies. The SPLM grassroots and supporters of the country’s unity among northerners (ethnically and geographically) and southerners harbor many questions searching for answers, and find themselves helpless, and feel embarrassed in responding to the endless queries of both friends and foes about the position of the Movement on issues of unity and separation, self determination and the referendum. Therefore, serious and frank dialogue that embraces the participation of the Movement grassroots, from all nationalities, regions and political shades, is the only entry point for dealing with these issues and finding the answers to the questions raised:

ii. UNITY AND THE RIGHT TO SELF DETERMINATION: Reconciling these two objectives represents the major challenge faced by the SPLM, by virtue of its vision and the nature of its membership. The success in advocating a policy that assigned priority to the unity of Sudan since its foundation in 1983 and up to the signing of the CPA in 2005, calls for the leadership of the Movement to follow an unambiguous strategy that reconciles the two seemingly contradictory objectives and reflects the aspirations of its grassroots spread all over the Sudan, including those who yearn for unity in the South. While the demand for the right of self determination, before and during the first Convention in 1994, took place on a ’’theoretical’’ level, the “actual exercise” of this right is now looming just around the corner. Thus, regardless of the endorsement in the first Convention of a clear strategy towards the building of the New Sudan, and despite the small numbers of Northerners at the time, yet their mere fear of the imposition of self determination into the Movement’s agenda (with the purpose of separation), following the Torit conference in 1991, represented a grave concern for the leadership. Thus, the apprehension of northerners in the SPLM led the late Chairman, with the participation of some of the Movement’s leadership, into a series of discussions and debates, both during and after the Convention, over the span of two months (November and December 1994) with the aim of further arriving at specific proposals supporting the unity objective of the Movement. This contrasts with the situation now when all indications show that separation is inevitable, in addition to the fact that all northerners, in the various states that fall under the jurisdiction of the Northern Sector, constitute one third of the membership of both the National Convention and the National Liberation Council, and more so the serious consequences of separation this time will impact the Movements grassroots in the Nuba mountains and the Ingessana whose population constituted fodder for the armed struggle for the New Sudan. Therefore, the question becomes: is the right of self determination synonymous with separation or is it a mechanism to achieve either unity or separation? If self determination is synonymous or tantamount to separation it would appear that the SPLM is striving to achieve two contradictory objectives: separation and unity of Sudan! However, if self determination is a mechanism, how it is used in favor of either objective remains in the hands of the political forces that had originally called for the exercise of the right. In this regard, has the Movement endeavored to undertake a feasibility study on the impact of each of the two options (unity and separation) on the future of the political, security and economic situations in the South and on the life of the Southern citizen, or managed a dialogue on the content and substance of the separatist cause? For instance, the CPA bestows on the South unprecedented constitutional and institutional powers and authority in the political and economic domains, and ensures the participation of Southerners, proportional to the population of the South, in the federal system of rule. Moreover, perhaps more importantly, the CPA constitutionally endorses citizenship rights for all Sudanese, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or gender, as the basis for public office eligibility, including the presidency of the Republic.

Though some of these hard-won gains and rights sanctioned by the Interim Constitution have not seen the day light, in the shadow of a reality dominated by political and institutional roadblocks, cultural prejudices, and social barriers, yet the political struggle for making citizenship rights a living reality will continue and will not be consummated with the end of the interim period. This struggle will endure even after the general elections and the ratification of the permanent constitution. Thus, we should not allow despair to take its grip and stand in the way of continuing the political struggle towards building the Sudanese citizenship state, based on equal rights and duties. Americans of African origin waited for their turn to reach the Presidency for more than two centuries until finally it came to fruition with the election of the forty fourth President. They did not allow the bitter conflict and protracted struggle for their civil rights to lead them to abandoning the cloak of the American Union. Indeed, the late Dr. John Garang counted on the dynamic nature of the SPLM and its capacity of interaction, including the building of alliances with the rest of the political forces in the North, to realize the long-cherished goal of change and transformation and to achieve full equality in rights and obligations. In turn, this leads me to discussing the Movement’s position on the Self-determination Referendum!

iii. POSITION ON THE REFERENDUM: The “mundane" response that unity constitutes the Movement’s preferred option, whereas it is the people of the South who will decide on this in the upcoming referendum, as an answer provided by the SPLM leadership to any question in this regard, is hardly convincing and remains unsatisfactory. In all contemporary experiences where the right to self determination has been demanded (Quebec in Canada, Eritrea, East Timor, Eastern Europe), movements or political parties championing the cause of this right started from a “separatist” perspective calling for the establishment of independent states for the peoples that these forces represent. In other words, these forces used the referendum for the right to self determination as a mechanism or tool to achieve the objective of separation, but more so to advertise for it through organized publicity campaigns, as is the case in any competitive electoral process with each party proselytizing for its position. Such practice is not in contradiction with the fact that people and citizens are the ones who in the end decide the outcome of the referendum or election. In contrast, the SPLM is a movement with a national character, which has spearheaded the struggle for the unity of the country (albeit on new bases), and its membership embraces different nationalities and peoples of Sudan. It is curious therefore, that if only Southerners have the right to participate in the Referendum, should the remaining membership of the Movement be deprived of even advocating for unity among their comrades, let alone amongst the non-SPLM members in the south? Besides, will the SPLM as a political organization, accommodating all nationalities, adopt a neutral position without pronouncing its stance, at least to make people aware of the pros and cons that each of the options (unity and separation) entails for southerners? Is not adopting a neutral position in itself a declared position in support of separation, albeit covertly, for a movement that has continued to promote and struggle, for over two decades, to achieve voluntary unity? This further begs the question: how will the Movement treat its position on the unity of the country in its electoral program?

On the other hand, Southerners have carried arms and have fought and sacrificed tremendously for over twenty years under the banner of the New Sudan, but did the people of the south decide, on their own volition, to pay such a high price and make all these sacrifices for the sake of this Vision? Or did the leadership of the SPLM lead them in this direction? Ironically, these same leaders have always and repeatedly declared that the first bullets the SPLA fired actually targeted the separatists within the Movement? It is the political leadership that shapes the minds of ordinary individuals and influences their thinking and behavior. Thus, it behooves on the leadership to create awareness of the option that is in the interest, and to the advantage of southerners. Separatists themselves remain accountable and responsible in front of their peoples to explain their point of view concerning the independent Southern state and how separation will serve their interests and meet their expectations. Hopefully they will reflect and learn the lessons from what the late leader Dr. Jon Garang said, namely that Sudan belongs to all Sudanese and, therefore, it is the responsibility of southerners to play their part as necessary for bringing about change in the entire Sudan as he stated “we cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to a mere fossilized regional sub-species”.

iii. ATTRACTIVE UNITY: The term “attractive unity” was coined by the mediators of the peace process in Machakos with the purpose of alluring southerners to vote in favor of unity following the stalemate over reaching an agreement on sources of legislation and a unified legal system. The “one country-2 systems” model was, thus, premised on the assumption that such interim and “provisional” arrangements provide space for promoting and fostering Sudanese commonality during an interim period that would eventually lead to “A Transformed Democratic Sudan”. Though the northern political forces, in particular the NCP, assume the lion’s share of the responsibility for transcending the interim dual system of laws, the CPA obliges the SPLM (as well as the NCP) to seriously work for making unity “attractive” so that southerners would freely opt for unity. Thus, while southern politicians, outside the SPLM, are free to mobilize during the interim period, support for separation, the SPLM and its cadres are obliged to work towards making unity attractive. This is an obligation that the SPLM cannot shun without seriously flouting the CPA. Besides, the SPLM as a revolutionary movement struggling for change, and by virtue of its vision, and the national character of its membership and supporters, is also obliged to promote its concept of unity on new bases. In fact, the demand of the SPLM for an effective presence in legislative and executive institutions throughout Northern Sudan, and its participation in the governance of those states for the duration of the pre-elections period, was made with the objective of making it possible for the Movement to advocate for the unity of Sudan. Indeed, in the words of the Movement’s leader in his 22nd SPLM/A Anniversary Address “The CPA enables the SPLM to retain its national character and to expand all over the Sudan. The SPLM shall consolidate itself in Southern Sudan where we shall have 70% of power and in the Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile where we shall have 45% of power. The SPLM shall also have 10% of power in all the remaining 15 States of the North. With the consolidation of the SPLM in Southern Sudan and its expansion and consolidation in the Nuba Mountains, Southern Blue Nile and the other States of the North, the SPLM clearly has the potential to become the majority party in the coming national elections at all levels – local, state and national”.

In this regard, what are the main features of the SPLM elections manifesto or program? What is the nature of the Movement’s political alliances that would lead to making unity attractive? In other words, what is the objective of the SPLM in contesting the elections? Is it the mere adherence to the CPA provisions, while impatiently waiting for the self-determination referendum and ultimately the secession of the south, or the genuine participation in the process of democratic transformation towards building the Sudanese citizenship-state, thus fulfilling the expectations and aspirations of the Movement’s grassroots and supporters? On the other hand, has the SPLM ever initiated serious and open dialogue or brainstorming over the true meaning of “attractive” unity, or attempted to define its own responsibilities and what it could really do in this respect? Has the SPLM devised any plan or policy for making unity attractive? The Movement, therefore, can be accused of half-heartedly supporting unity, thus, covertly harboring separatist inclinations. Thus, it seems to the membership and supporters of the SPLM, especially in the north, as if the Movement has replaced the New Sudan vision and the Manifesto with the CPA and has withdrawn into a cocoon, waiting for secession of the South, instead of using the Agreement as a launching pad, which in reality that is all that it is, to achieve its grand objective: the united New Sudan. Thus, if unity is unattractive in the eyes of some, what is attractive about separation?

iii. THE STATE AND RELIGION: The signing of the Machakos Protocol and the following Naivasha peace negotiations aroused suspicions and criticisms about the terms of the CPA. Subscribing to the “one country-two systems” was seen as a prelude to dividing up the country. It was felt that the SPLM had reneged on its position on the relation between the state and religion by agreeing to the maintenance of Sharia’a in the North. In the course of the response to these suspicions in the Introduction to my book (John Garang: Vision of the New Sudan and Rebuilding of the Sudanese State, 2005), I argued that this is a misreading of the outcome of the negotiations and a failure of understanding the logic and rules of these negotiations. To start with, the CPA is neither the program of the Movement nor is it the project that the NC aspired to realize. When it comes to negotiated settlements there is no winner or loser and no party is in a position to impose its will completely. In the particular context of the Sudanese conflict, the SPLM/A, and for that matter the NDA, has not defeated the government, a precondition for repealing the existing laws, and moving on to a new Sudanese political dispensation. However, since then, the SPLM has been completely silent on the relation between religion and the state, and has hardly ever discussed the issue, which did not help in wiping out these accusations. In fact, suspicions were probably aggravated by the intervention of Deng Alor at the UNMIS symposium in which he avowed “why people are surprised when a southerner says that he (or she) is a second class citizen under an Islamic government”? Many observers, including SPLM supporters, did not take what Deng has said seriously, but considered it a sort of political expediency, since the issue has not been raised during the past five years that followed the signing of the CPA. Moreover, overlooking the issue throughout this period led many people to suspect the SPLM Northern Sector as a mere (branch) of a (southern) movement, and as such is shouldered alone with the responsibility of separating religion from the state in the (state of northern Sudan) as long as this objective has been realized in the constitution of (southern Sudan), as if the Movement leadership is saying (what have we to do with the north!)?

The “Juba All Political Parties Conference” would have been the appropriate forum for discussing this question, but the SPLM did not seek reaching a consensus on the future of the Sharia laws and ensuring citizenship rights. As I explained in earlier writings, more than one breakthrough was realized on the most contentious issues of citizenship, on the one hand, and the relation between the state and religion, on the other, between the SPLM and the religion-based forces in the north. These breakthroughs started with the Sudan Peace Initiative (Mirghani-Garang) in 1988, followed by the NDA resolutions in Nairobi in 1993, and then the Asmara Conference on Fundamental Issues in 1995. Ironically, though the NIF (later the NCP) is the only political party that did not participate in, or even blessed, this dialogue, yet it was also able to achieve a breakthrough in the negotiations with the SPLM, regardless of its adverse impact on the unity of the country. Thus, first the NCP accepted the DOP of IGAD in 1994, and later signed the Machakos Protocol in 2002, on which the present legal system(s) is premised. Thus, dialogue between the SPLM and the rest of the political forces, including the NCP, constitutes the first option for reaching a consensus and to rise above the issues that divide us. Elections represent the second route provided by the CPA to transcend the obstacles inherent in the “one country-2 systems” model. The SPLM is aware that law-making, including repealing laws, is a along and complex process and not an event. What has not been achieved in the CPA is subject to be revisited and modified through the general elections, since the issue of laws for the National Capital has been deferred to the elected national parliament, and therefore all political forces that want to move forward the agenda of civil laws have a fighting chance in that parliament. Indeed, Article 2.4.5 of the CPA regarding Agreement on the National Capital, where Sharia’a law and its application in the National Capital reads “Without prejudice to the competency of any National Institution (Parliament) to promulgate laws”, implying that parliament can promulgate any law, including secular laws.

All of the above begs a legitimate query: Will the position on the relation between religion and state constitute one of the measures that will guide the articulation of the SPLM electoral manifesto, in addition to mapping its electoral alliances and determining its allies? Or is the call by the SPLM for the abrogation of these laws, as one of the necessary and imperative conditions for ending the war, a sheer pretext to advance the right of self determination as a first step, to be used subsequently as a raison d’être for separation when the time comes to decide on this right through the Referendum? This is precisely what was impressed on people’s minds through Deng Alor belated statement on the issue of the state and religion!

iv. MARGINALIZED AREAS: Undoubtedly the expected secession of the South will precipitate potentially explosive situations in the two areas of Southern Kordofan (Nuba Mountains) and Southern Blue Nile (Ingessana), especially if we take into consideration the two partners’ conflicting interpretation of the meaning and substance of "popular consultation"" as stipulated in the special protocol for these areas in the CPA (Protocol on the Resolution of Conflict in Southern Kordofan/Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile states). These two areas hold exceptional significance for the SPLM: not only are they are bordering the south, but in addition large numbers of their population were the first in the geographical north to initiate joining the SPLM/A since the beginning, and have dearly sacrificed a lot throughout the liberation war, besides constituting two of the five liberated areas which fell within the administration of the New Sudan in the pre-CPA era. Moreover, separation of the south would diminish the chances of achieving a New Sudan, where all citizens are equal in rights and duties, or even of preserving the old or the present version of Sudan. This predicament relegates the grassroots of the SPLM in these two (transitional) areas into a state of flux and disappointment.

v. The SPLM: WHERETO? If brainstorming has taken place on the future of Southern Sudan in the post 2011 period, through convening many seminars and symposia for this purpose both within and outside Sudan, it is equally pertinent to commence a deep dialogue and frank discussion on the present status of the SPLM and future scenarios.

This contribution has aimed at candidly expressing my opinion that a fundamental cause with the enormity and weight of the unity/ separation problematic in Sudan necessarily calls for a deep dialogue within the ranks of all the Sudanese political forces, and among their grassroots. This is a concern that causes anxiety and insomnia, on daily basis, for the enthusiasts of the country’s unity. As such, there is no option to unravel this equation other than the engagement of all and the participation of everyone in an open and genuine dialogue. The intervention focused on the imperative for such dialogue within the SPLM in particular due to objective and subjective factors, on top of which is the fact that it is the Movement that has originally called for the right of self determination at a certain phase in its historical evolution. Equally, however, this interactive dialogue must also take place within the NCP, as the senior partner in power, a prerequisite for reaching national reconciliation and a historical compromise that would preserve the interests of all stakeholders in the country. Likewise, the opposition political forces are obliged to expound their vision for preserving unity based on democracy, justice, and equality. In fact, this is precisely what the CPA is all about. So why not utilize the Agreement, as was actually intended, in a bid to build on and expand the commonalities between all national Sudanese forces supporting the restructuring of the Sudanese state on bases of citizenship rights, and denouncing all forms of chauvinism? The CPA is not an end in itself, but rather a means to reach this national reconciliation. Elections or the referendum are mere tools governing and streamlining this reconciliation! It is only this national reconciliation that would spare us the evils of external interventions!

Dr. Elwathig Kameir is a member of the SPLM Political Bureau. He can be reached at kameir@yahoo.com

Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By ANDREW RICE

Dr. Robert Zeigler, an eminent American botanist, flew to Saudi Arabia in March for a series of high-level discussions about the future of the kingdom’s food supply. Saudi leaders were frightened: heavily dependent on imports, they had seen the price of rice and wheat, their dietary staples, fluctuate violently on the world market over the previous three years, at one point doubling in just a few months. The Saudis, rich in oil money but poor in arable land, were groping for a strategy to ensure that they could continue to meet the appetites of a growing population, and they wanted Zeigler’s expertise.

There are basically two ways to increase the supply of food: find new fields to plant or invent ways to multiply what existing ones yield. Zeigler runs the International Rice Research Institute, which is devoted to the latter course, employing science to expand the size of harvests. During the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s, the institute’s laboratory developed “miracle rice,” a high-yielding strain that has been credited with saving millions of people from famine. Zeigler went to Saudi Arabia hoping that the wealthy kingdom might offer money for the basic research that leads to such technological breakthroughs. Instead, to his surprise, he discovered that the Saudis wanted to attack the problem from the opposite direction. They were looking for land.

In a series of meetings, Saudi government officials, bankers and agribusiness executives told an institute delegation led by Zeigler that they intended to spend billions of dollars to establish plantations to produce rice and other staple crops in African nations like Mali, Senegal, Sudan and Ethiopia. “They laid out this incredible plan,” Zeigler recalled. He was flabbergasted, not only by the scale of the projects but also by the audacity of their setting. Africa, the world’s most famished continent, can’t currently feed itself, let alone foreign markets.

The American scientist was catching a glimpse of an emerging test of the world’s food resources, one that has begun to take shape over the last year, largely outside the bounds of international scrutiny. A variety of factors — some transitory, like the spike in food prices, and others intractable, like global population growth and water scarcity — have created a market for farmland, as rich but resource-deprived nations in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere seek to outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant. Because much of the world’s arable land is already in use — almost 90 percent, according to one estimate, if you take out forests and fragile ecosystems — the search has led to the countries least touched by development, in Africa. According to a recent study by the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land is the billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone, a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola.

Foreign investors — some of them representing governments, some of them private interests — are promising to construct infrastructure, bring new technologies, create jobs and boost the productivity of underused land so that it not only feeds overseas markets but also feeds more Africans. (More than a third of the continent’s population is malnourished.) They’ve found that impoverished governments are often only too welcoming, offering land at giveaway prices. A few transactions have received significant publicity, like Kenya’s deal to lease nearly 100,000 acres to the Qatari government in return for financing a new port, or South Korea’s agreement to develop almost 400 square miles in Tanzania. But many other land deals, of near-unprecedented size, have been sealed with little fanfare.

Investors who are taking part in the land rush say they are confronting a primal fear, a situation in which food is unavailable at any price. Over the 30 years between the mid-1970s and the middle of this decade, grain supplies soared and prices fell by about half, a steady trend that led many experts to believe that there was no limit to humanity’s capacity to feed itself. But in 2006, the situation reversed, in concert with a wider commodities boom. Food prices increased slightly that year, rose by a quarter in 2007 and skyrocketed in 2008. Surplus-producing countries like Argentina and Vietnam, worried about feeding their own populations, placed restrictions on exports. American consumers, if they noticed the food crisis at all, saw it in modestly inflated supermarket bills, especially for meat and dairy products. But to many countries — not just in the Middle East but also import-dependent nations like South Korea and Japan — the specter of hyperinflation and hoarding presented an existential threat.

“When some governments stop exporting rice or wheat, it becomes a real, serious problem for people that don’t have full self-sufficiency,” said Al Arabi Mohammed Hamdi, an economic adviser to the Arab Authority for Agricultural Investment and Development. Sitting in his office in Dubai, overlooking the cargo-laden wooden boats moored along the city’s creek, Hamdi told me his view, that the only way to assure food security is to control the means of production.

Hamdi’s agency, which coordinates investments on behalf of 20 member states, has recently announced several projects, including a tentative $250 million joint venture with two private companies, which is slated to receive heavy subsidies from a Saudi program called the King Abdullah Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad. He said the main fields of investment for the project would most likely be Sudan and Ethiopia, countries with favorable climates that are situated just across the Red Sea. Hamdi waved a sheaf of memos that had just arrived on his desk, which he said were from another partner, Sheik Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a billionaire member of the royal family of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, who has shown interest in acquiring land in Sudan and Eritrea. “There is no problem about money,” Hamdi said. “It’s about where and how.”

A long the dirt road that runs to Lake Ziway, a teardrop in the furrow of Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley, farmers drove their donkey carts past a little orange-domed Orthodox church, and the tombs of their ancestors, decorated with vivid murals of horses and cattle. Between clusters of huts that looked as if they were constructed of matchsticks, there were wide-open wheat fields, where skinny young men were tilling the soil with wooden plows and teams of oxen. And then, nearing the lake, a fence appeared, closing off the countryside behind taut strings of barbed wire.

All through the Rift Valley region, my travel companion, an Ethiopian economist, had taken to pointing out all the new fence posts, standing naked and knobby like freshly cut saplings — mundane signifiers, he said, of the recent rush for Ethiopian land. In the old days, he told me, farmers rarely bothered with such formal lines of demarcation, but now the country’s earth is in demand. This fence, though, was different from the others — it stretched on for a mile or more. Behind it, we could glimpse a vast expanse of dark volcanic soil, recently turned over by tractors. “So,” said my guide, “this belongs to the sheik.”

He meant Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi, a Saudi Arabia-based oil-and-construction billionaire who was born in Ethiopia and maintains a close relationship with the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s autocratic regime. (Fear of both men led my guide to say he didn’t want to be identified by name.) Over time, Al Amoudi, one of the world’s 50 richest people, according to Forbes, has used his fortune and political ties to amass control over large portions of Ethiopia’s private sector, including mines, hotels and plantations on which he grows tea, coffee, rubber and japtropha, a plant that has enormous promise as a biofuel. Since the global price spike, he has been getting into the newly lucrative world food trade.

Ethiopia might seem an unlikely hotbed of agricultural investment. To most of the world, the country is defined by images of famine: about a million people died there during the drought of the mid-1980s, and today about four times that many depend on emergency food aid. But according to the World Bank, as much as three-quarters of Ethiopia’s arable land is not under cultivation, and agronomists say that with substantial capital expenditure, much of it could become bountiful. Since the world food crisis, Zenawi, a former Marxist rebel who has turned into a champion of private capital, has publicly said he is “very eager” to attract foreign farm investors by offering them what the government describes as “virgin land.” An Ethiopian agriculture ministry official recently told Reuters that he has identified more than seven million acres. The government plans to lease half of it before the next harvest, at the dirt-cheap annual rate of around 50 cents per acre. “We are associated with hunger, although we have enormous investment opportunities,” explained Abi Woldemeskel, director general of the Ethiopian Investment Agency. “So that negative perception has to be changed through promotion.”

The government’s pliant attitude, along with Ethiopia’s convenient location, has made it an ideal target for Middle Eastern investors like Mohammed Al Amoudi. Not long ago, a newly formed Al Amoudi company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development, announced its plans to obtain the rights to more than a million acres — a land mass the size of Delaware — in the apparent hope of capitalizing on the Saudi government’s initiative to subsidize overseas staple-crop production. At a pilot site in the west of the country, he’s already cultivating rice. Earlier this year, amid great fanfare marking the start of the program, Al Amoudi personally presented the first shipment from the farm to King Abdullah in Riyadh. Meanwhile, in the Rift Valley region, another subsidiary is starting to grow fruits and vegetables for export to the Persian Gulf.

Al Amoudi’s plans raise a recurring question surrounding investment in food production: who will reap the benefits? As we drove down to the waterside, through fields dotted with massive sycamores, a farm supervisor told me that the 2,000-acre enterprise currently produces food for the local market, but there were plans to irrigate with water from the lake, and to shift the focus to exports. In the distance, dozens of laborers were bent to the ground, planting corn and onions.

Later, when I asked a couple of workers how much they were paid, they said nine birr each day, or around 75 cents. It wasn’t much, but Al Amoudi’s defenders say that’s the going rate for farm labor in Ethiopia. They argue that his investments are creating jobs, improving the productivity of dormant land and bringing economic development to rural communities. “We have achieved what the government hasn’t done for how many years,” says Arega Worku, an Ethiopian who is an agriculture adviser to Al Amoudi. (Al Amoudi declined to be interviewed.) Ethiopian journalists and opposition figures, however, have questioned the economic benefits of the deals, as well as Al Amoudi’s cozy relationship with the ruling party.

By far the most powerful opposition, however, surrounds the issue of land rights — a problem of historic proportions in Ethiopia. Just down the road from the farm on Lake Ziway, I caught sight of a gray-bearded man wearing a weathered pinstripe blazer, who was crouched over a ditch, washing his shoes. I stopped to ask him about the fence, and before long, a large group of villagers gathered around to tell me a resentful story. Decades ago, they said, during the rule of a Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, the land was confiscated from them. After that dictatorship was overthrown, Al Amoudi took over the farm in a government privatization deal, over the futile objections of the displaced locals. The billionaire might consider the land his, but the villagers had long memories, and they angrily maintained that they were its rightful owners.

Throughout Africa, the politics of land is linked to the grim reality of hunger. Famines, typically produced by some combination of weather, pestilence and bad governance, break out with merciless randomness, unleashing calamity and reshaping history. Every country has its unique dynamics. Unlike most African nations, Ethiopia was never colonized in the 19th century but instead was ruled by emperors, who granted feudal plantations to members of their royal courts. The last emperor, Haile Selassie, was brought down by a famine that fueled a popular uprising. His dispossessed subjects chanted the slogan “land to the tiller.” The succeeding Communist dictatorship, which took ownership of all land for itself and pursued a disastrous collectivization policy, was toppled in the aftermath of the droughts of the 1980s. Under the present regime, private ownership of land is still banned, and every farmer in Ethiopia, foreign and domestic, works his fields under a licensing arrangement with the government. This land-tenure policy has made it possible for a one-party state to hand over huge tracts to investors at nominal rents, in secrecy, without the bother of a condemnation process.

Ethiopia’s government denies that anyone is being displaced, saying that the land is unused — an assertion many experts doubt. “One thing that is very clear, that seems to have escaped the attention of most investors, is that this is not simply empty land,” says Michael Taylor, a policy specialist at the International Land Coalition. If land in Africa hasn’t been planted, he says, it’s probably for a reason. Maybe it’s used to graze livestock, or deliberately left fallow to prevent nutrient depletion and erosion.

There is an ongoing debate among experts about the extent of the global land-acquisition trend. By its nature the evidence is piecemeal and anecdotal, and many highly publicized investments have yet to actually materialize on the ground. The most serious attempt to quantify the land rush, spearheaded by the International Institute for Environment and Development, suggests that as of earlier this year, the Ethiopian government had approved deals totaling around 1.5 million acres, while the country’s investment agency reports that it has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects since 2007, nearly doubling the number registered in the entire previous decade. But that’s far from a complete picture. While the details of a few arrangements have leaked out, like one Saudi consortium’s plans to spend $100 million to grow wheat, barley and rice, many others remain undisclosed, and Addis Ababa has been awash in rumors of Arab moneymen who supposedly rent planes, pick out fertile tracts and cut deals.

Of course, there have been scrambles for African land before. In the view of critics, the colonial legacy is what makes the large land deals so outrageous, and they warn of potentially calamitous consequences. “Wars have been fought over this,” says Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with Grain, an advocacy group that opposes large-scale agribusiness and has played a key role in bringing attention to what it calls the “global land grab.”

It wasn’t until Grain compiled a long list of such deals into a polemical report titled “Seized!” last October that experts really began to talk about a serious trend. Although deals were being brokered in disparate locales like Australia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Vietnam, the most controversial field of investment was clearly Africa. “When you started to get some hints about what was happening in these deals,” Kuyek says, “it was shocking.” Within a month, Grain’s warnings seemed to be vindicated when The Financial Times broke news that the South Korean conglomerate Daewoo Logistics had signed an agreement to take over about half of Madagascar’s arable land, paying nothing, with the intention of growing corn and palm oil for export. Popular protests broke out, helping to mobilize opposition to Madagascar’s already unpopular president, who was overthrown in a coup in March.

The episode illustrated the emotional volatility of the land issue and raised questions about the degree to which corrupt leaders might be profiting off the deals. Since then, there has been an international outcry. Legislators from the Philippines have called for an investigation into their government’s agreements with various investing nations, while Thailand’s leader has vowed to chase off any foreign land buyers.

But there’s more than one side to the argument. Development economists and African governments say that if a country like Ethiopia is ever going to feed itself, let alone wean itself from foreign aid, which totaled $2.4 billion in 2007, it will have to find some way of increasing the productivity of its agriculture. “We’ve been complaining for decades about the lack of investment in African agriculture,” says David Hallam, a trade expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization. Last fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that a “middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture” has clouded the African development debate with “romanticism.” Approvingly citing the example of Brazil — where masses of indigenous landholders were displaced in favor of large-scale farms — Collier concluded that “to ignore commercial agriculture as a force for rural development and enhanced food supply is surely ideological.”

In Ethiopia, Mohammed Al Amoudi and other foreign agricultural investors are putting Collier’s theory into practice. Near the southern town of Awassa, in a shadow of a soaring Rift Valley escarpment, sits a field of waving corn and a complex of domed greenhouses, looking pristine and alien against the natural backdrop. On an overcast July morning, dozens of laborers were at work preparing the ground for one of Al Amoudi’s latest enterprises: a commercial vegetable farm.

“For a grower, this is heaven on earth,” says Jan Prins, managing director of the subsidiary company that is running the venture for Al Amoudi. Originally from the Netherlands, Prins says he assumed that Ethiopia was arid but was surprised to learn when he came to the country that much of it was fertile, with diverse microclimates. The Awassa farm is one of four that Prins is getting up and running. Using computerized irrigation systems, the farms will grow tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, melons and other fresh produce, the vast majority of it to be shipped to Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Over time, he says, he hopes to expand into growing other crops, like wheat and barley, the latter of which can be used to feed camels.

The nations of the Persian Gulf are likely to see their populations increase by half by 2030, and already import 60 percent of their food. Self-sufficiency isn’t a viable option, as the Saudis have learned through bitter experience. In the 1970s, worries about the stability of the global food supply inspired the Saudi government to grow wheat through intensive irrigation. Between 1980 and 1999, according to a study by Elie Elhadj, a banker and historian, the Saudis pumped 300 billion cubic meters of water into their desert. By the early 1990s, the kingdom had managed to become the world’s sixth-largest wheat exporter. But then its leaders started paying attention to the warnings of environmentalists, who pointed out that irrigation was draining a nonreplenishable supply of underground freshwater. Saudi Arabia now plans to phase out wheat production by 2016, which is one reason it’s looking to other countries to fill its food needs.

“The rules of the game have changed,” says Saad Al Swatt, the chief executive of the Tabuk Agricultural Development Company, one of the kingdom’s largest farming concerns. Al Swatt’s company was one of those that met with Robert Zeigler about farming rice; he says that with government encouragement, he is looking at expanding into countries like Sudan, Ethiopia and Vietnam. “They have the land, they have the water, but unfortunately, they don’t have the system or sometimes the finance to have these large-scale agricultural projects.” Al Swatt says. “We wanted to export our experience and really develop those areas, to help people.”

About 10 percent of the more than 80 million people who live in Ethiopia suffer from chronic food shortages. This year, because of poor rains, the U.N. World Food Program warns that much of East Africa faces the threat of a famine, potentially the worst in almost two decades. Traditionally, the model for feeding the hungry in Africa has involved shipping in surpluses from the rest of the world in times of emergency, but governments that are trying to attract investment say that the new farms could provide a lasting, noncharitable solution. (“It’s better than begging,” one Ethiopian official recently told the African publication Business Daily.) Whatever the long-term justification, however, it looks bad politically for countries like Kenya and Ethiopia to be letting foreign investors use their land at a time when their people face the specter of mass starvation. And many experts wonder whether such governments will go through with the deals. Ethiopia, after all, was one of the countries that banned grain exports during the recent spike in world food prices. “The idea that one country would go to another country,” says Robert Zeigler, “and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”

The hyperinflationary spiral that caused the world food crisis had multiple causes. The harvests in 2006 and 2007 were the worst of the decade, hedge funds and other players in the commodities markets appear to have driven up prices and government subsidies for biofuels encouraged farmers to grow crops that ended up as ethanol. But the environment and demography are more lasting issues, and experts predict that prices, which have declined since their peak, are likely to stabilize significantly above precrisis levels. This represents a danger to the developing world, where the poor spend between 50 and 80 percent of their income on food, but it may also present an opportunity. If one good thing has emerged from the crisis, it’s a growing awareness of Africa’s unrealized agricultural potential. Because where there are appetites, there are profits to be made.

In late June, several hundred farmers and investment bankers came together in Manhattan to survey the landscape at a conference on global agriculture investment. The food crisis has served as a catalyst for the sleepy agricultural sector, spurring financial firms like Goldman Sachs and BlackRock to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas agricultural projects, so the mood was heady for business, though depressing for humanity. There much talk of Thomas Malthus, the 19th-century prophet of overpopulation and famine.

“Beware of 2020 and beyond, because we think there could be genuine food shortages by that period,” Susan Payne, the chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, told the audience during a talk on Africa’s agricultural potential. She showed a series of slides citing chilling statistics: grain stocks are at their lowest levels in 60 years; there were food riots in 15 countries in 2008; global warming is turning arable land into desert; freshwater is dwindling and China is draining its reserves; and the really big problem that contributes to all the others — the world’s population is growing by 80 million hungry people a year. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in order to feed the world’s projected population in 2050 — some nine billion people — agricultural production needs to increase by an annual average of 1 percent. That means adding around 23 million tons of cereals to the world’s food supply next year, a little less than the total production of Australia in 2008.

“Africa is the final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one continent that remains relatively unexploited.” Emergent’s African Agricultural Land Fund, started last year, is investing several hundred million dollars into commercial farms around the continent. Africa may be known for decrepit infrastructure and corrupt governments — problems that are being steadily alleviated, Payne argues — but land and labor come so cheaply there that she calculates the risks are worthwhile.

The payoffs could be immense. In a country like Ethiopia, farmers put in backbreaking effort, but they yield about a third as much wheat per acre as do Europe, China or Chile. Even modest interventions could start to close this gap. One small example: the black soil I saw throughout the Great Rift region. Known as vertisol, it’s a product of volcanic activity and possesses the nutrients to produce enormous harvests. Because of its high clay content, however, it becomes sticky and waterlogged during the rainy season, which makes it very difficult to plow by traditional methods. With the addition of advanced implements, improved seeds and fertilizer, you can double the amount of wheat it yields. Ethiopia, like all of Africa, is full of such opportunities, which is one reason the World Bank says that investing in agriculture is one of the most effective ways to speed economic development on the continent.

Yet agriculture has historically been a tiny item in foreign-aid budgets. For years, governments, private foundations and donor institutions like the World Bank have been urging African governments to fill the spending gap with private investment. Now, at the very moment a world food crisis has come along, creating the perhaps fleeting possibility of an influx of capital into African agriculture, some of the same organizations are sending conflicting messages. The Food and Agriculture Organization, for instance, co-sponsored a report calling for a major expansion of commercial agriculture in Africa, but the organization’s director-general has simultaneously been warning of the “neocolonial” dangers of land deals. “We’re making them feel that it’s sinful,” says Mafa Chipeta, a Malawian who oversees Ethiopia and the rest of eastern Africa for the organization. “Why are we not saying, here is an opportunity?”

One focus of agricultural investment in Ethiopia is the region of Gambella, near the border with Sudan. The World Bank says it has more than four million acres of irrigable land. “It’s emerald green, the whole place is fertile and they have only 200,000 people down there,” says Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, head of an Indian commercial farming company. Earlier this year, Karuturi signed an agreement with the government to lease close to 800,000 acres on which he will grow rice, wheat and sugar cane, among other crops. Karuturi told me he doesn’t have to export the food to make money; there’s plenty of profit potential in the East African market. He has flown in John Deere tractors, agricultural experts from Texas A&M and commercial farmers from Mississippi to help him get things going. He says he’s raising $100 million in capital from private equity firms for the first phase of the project, which he estimates will ultimately cost well over a billion dollars. “Recently, I saw a lot of articles . . . where they referred to me as a food pirate,” Karuturi says. “This whole thing is so elitist, it’s ridiculous. They want Africa to remain poor.”

But the argument against enormous land concessions needn’t be based solely on appeals to human rights, environmental warnings or romanticism. It’s possible to be a believer in development without endorsing Paul Collier’s view that the small landholders stand in its way. In fact, there’s a whole school of economic thought that says that Collier is wrong, that big is not necessarily better in agriculture — and that the land deals therefore might be unwise not because they’re wrong but because they’re unprofitable. A recent World Bank study found that large-scale export agriculture in Africa has succeeded only with plantation crops like sugar and tea or in ventures that were propped up by extreme government subsidies, during colonialism or during the apartheid era in South Africa.

This record of failure is one reason that the government of Qatar, in addressing its food-security concerns, has chosen to concentrate on investing in existing agribusinesses rather than just acquiring land. That’s just one of many ways to invest in farming without removing the African farmers. On a bright Rift Valley afternoon, I went to see another option, a cooperative scheme under which a group of around 300 Ethiopians, working plots of 4 to 10 acres, were getting into export agriculture. During the European winter, they grew green beans for the Dutch market. The rest of the year, they cultivated corn and other crops for local consumption. The land had been irrigated with the help of a nonprofit organization and an Ethiopian commercial farmer named Tsegaye Abebe, who brought all the produce to market.

As a breeze riffled through a tall field of corn, a group of farmers, wearing sandals made from old tires, told me the arrangement, while not perfect, was beneficial in the most crucial respect: they weren’t toiling for someone else. Not far away, a Pakistani investor had taken over a government cattle ranch, once an area free for grazing, and had put fences and trenches in place to keep out the local livestock. The Ethiopians who worked there were miserable.

The farmers had heard rumors that foreign investors were eyeing still more Ethiopian land. Imam Gemedo Tilago, a 78-year-old cloaked in a white cotton shawl, shook his finger, vowing that Allah would not allow the community to remain passive. But that was a problem for the future, and the farmers had more grounded concerns. I noticed, driving down the rural paths that led to this farm, that the earth looked parched in places, and the cattle were showing their ribs through their dull brown hides. The worried farmers told me that this year, the seasonal rains were late in coming to the Rift Valley. If they didn’t arrive soon, there’d be hunger.

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer and the author of “The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget,” about a Ugandan murder trial.