Important lessons for SPLM leadership

By John G Nyuot Yoh

26 September 2005 — The formation of the Government of National Unity (GONU) on 20 September 2005 after several weeks of heated debates between National Congress Party (NCP)
and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) have
revealed four important lessons which the SPLM
leadership must carefully study and take some actions
on:

Firstly, the debate over who should take the ministry
of energy and mining has sidelined the central role of
the SPLM as the guardian of the Sudan’s transformation
and the guarantor of the Southern Sudanese rights in a
united transformed Sudan. The SPLM’s ideological and
philosophical tenants of change and transformation,
from decadent corrupt old Sudan, where leadership’s
main objective is to accumulate wealth, manipulate
poor people’s sentiments in the name of religion and
Arab chauvinism, using political Islam as a means to
rule the country, to a Sudan where the ordinary
Sudanese is the main focus of the government, these
important tenants were blurred by the Energy and
Mining politics. The NCP leadership was and is aware
that the oil is in the South and knew that the SPLM
has the right to be allocated the ministry. What the
NCP had in it side was time. It knew that the SPLM
needs to gain time, and that was what the NCP used
against it. Throughout the negotiations over the
Energy Ministry, the SPLM was made to concentrate on
the South, so that its real potential as the main
political catalyst for the transformation of the Sudan
in the country could be watered down.

The SPLM is seen by Sudanese to be the vehicle for
change and the instrument of change in the country.
The fact that the NCP managed to make the SPLM looked
during the negotiation as a local Southern party, was
a big blow to the SPLM as a national progressive
movement. The SPLM must take immediate remedial
actions to correct that situation. One way to do so
would be to become directly involved in peace
negotiations with Darfurians and Easterners and make
sure that their shares in power are secured. The New
Sudan ideology was never about distribution of
positions or power, it was about equality and just
distribution of these positions, but most importantly
about bringing change to the whole country where each
Sudanese feels that truly he/she is a Sudanese who
deserves a government, for which she/he will be proud
of.

The SPLM as the guardian of change in the country,
there is no doubt that it was hard hit by the death of
Dr. John Garang. However, the unity and the collective
approach which the new SPLM leadership had shown
during the past month and half, was so strong that,
had its leadership concentrated on its national
agenda, by not only negotiating on the behalf of the
South, but of all the progressive political forces in
the country, it would have won more substantial
positions, not only for the South, but even for the
Darfurians, the Easterners and the NDA as its natural
allies. What Al-Beshir-Taha alliance did, was to show
the SPLM that the NCP is the main power broker in the
country, and that it is the NCP that offer positions,
and therefore, any talk of power and wealth sharing,
should be determined, not by the provisions of the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), but by new
negotiations with the NCP. The SPLM has therefore
committed itself to an open ended path to continuous
negotiations over government positions, commissions
and financial rows that will certainly follow. It
therefore does not make sense that the SPLM allowed
the NCP to take ministries of defence, interior,
finance, energy and mining and Justice, because it’s
simply means that the provisions of power and wealth
sharing in the CPA have been trashed. It also means
that the provision that unity should be made
attractive to Southerners during the interim period,
will no longer have meaning, not only to Southerners,
but also to other political groups in the country who
feel that the CPA is a good document that could be
applied to their situations. Even if the SPLM
leadership was convinced that the NCP was playing with
time, knowing that it is the SPLM that will bring back
hundred of thousands of returnees and displaced
persons into the South and that it is the SPLM that
will need to deliver to the people of the South
essential services, and therefore the SPLM should have
not have wasted time negotiating positions with people
who have no respect to agreements, even if the above
factors are genuine as they were, there is no reason
why the SPLM should have given up all the most
important economic and political positions to the NCP,
thus creating the impression that every time a new
round of negotiations comes, and there will be many of
them, the SPLM will give in because the NCP is not
interested in implementing the CPA..

Secondly, the formation of the government of national
unity has also revealed that while the decision making
process within the SPLM leadership has improved
compared to what it used to be, where very few were
the core of the decision making process, the manner in
which positions were announced, without the knowledge
of 80% of those who were appointed, has revealed that
something seriously needs to be revised in that
process. Some members of the movement were allocated
positions, which, if they were informed, might not
have accepted, or if given the choice, would have
declined them, because those positions did not fit
well with their experiences. While the SPLM line up is
by and large representative, regionally and
ethnically, the nature of the line up, especially its
technical aspects, have lots to be desired.

The SPLM leadership should make it VERY clear that
those of its members, who are appointed in Government
of National Unity, are given assignments to represent
the movement not themselves. This could be done in two
ways: recalling all those who are appointed in GONU to
Juba, for a week of political briefing, where the
whole leadership, plus the Southern Assembly give the
SPLM ministers in GONU a code of conduct, advise them
to work as a team, rather than as individuals. The
SPLM leadership may as well ask its representatives in
GONU to report every two months to Juba for a
briefing. If this is not done, then it will be like
sending these men and women to exile, where each of
them within the next year or so, will find himself, or
herself alone, cornered by NCP petrodollar politics,
and who knows what next.

Some of the SPLM members in GONU have protested,
because they felt that they deserve higher positions
than the ones they have been appointed to. Others
strongly felt that the communities and the
nationalities they come from were allocated very
junior positions, compared to their real political and
numerical sizes. Others complained that some
individual members of the Movement were allocated
senior positions in GONU, which should have been
allocated to more senior members, who joined the
Movement earlier. One of the explanations given by
some members of the SPLM leadership to answer some of
these complains, was that some of these senior SPLM
members do not want to work in the north. The question
then is, if these members have already informed the
leadership, directly or indirectly, of their intention
not to work in the north, then why allocate to them
positions in the north? These issues should be
carefully studied by the leadership, and if the SPLM
leadership has not already allocated positions in the
government of Southern Sudan and in governments of
states, it has to widen its consultations, inform
those it intends to deploy.

Most importantly, those who are currently advising the
SPLM leadership should open their eyes and ears
widely, because the SPLM-NCP partnership suppose to
avoid focus on distribution of positions, and
concentrate on creating a true change in the lives of
the people of Sudan and the South in particular.
Giving the impression that the sole aim of the
SPLM-NCP partnership is to buy people loyalty with
positions, will definitely defeat the purpose of the
SPLM/A struggle, for which millions have died, and
other millions waiting to go home and find real
changes there, when they go back. This is the real
challenge for the SPLM leadership.

Thirdly, the lesson which the SPLM should learn from
the politics of the formation of the GONU is that
whenever a leadership of an organisation preoccupies
itself with procedures and take longer times
negotiating political issues, the other parts of the
organisation, tend to paralyze. This is always the
case in centralised system, where members of the
movement are waiting in anticipation of getting orders
and do not participate in decision making. The SPLM
leadership should start to divide roles among its
members. And it has lots of qualified people to take
up such roles, only if the leadership and its advisors
look around them and spread the nets wider beyond
their immediate surroundings.

Indeed, it was impressive that once it became clear
that the NCP was buying time, the SPLM leadership
correctly decided to speed up the process of formation
of constitutional structures in the South. It could
have been done faster and better. When the SPLM and
NCP where busy negotiating positions, the NCP was busy
emptying the treasuries of national economy and
enriching its cronies and potential allies. The SPLM
should have appointed a shadow caretaking government
of its own, during the pre-interim period to work with
the NCP. The SPLM did appoint one person to deal with
NCP as a contact person; it should have appointed a
representative in every ministry in central government
to monitor the activities there. In fact, the NCP
care-taking government had done so many things during
the past six months that it would have not done, even
when it was still a government. During the
negotiations, the NCP was busy signing contracts,
cementing its international relations and indeed was
busy emptying the Ministry of Foreign affairs from its
staff, deploying them to all corners of the world, in
anticipation that the SPLM will find all the embassies
and consulates full with manpower, hence leaving no
room for the new minister to employ Southerners and
members from the other marginalised areas.
The SPLM leadership should therefore come up with a
new mechanism, through which a selected dedicated
group of its members are allocated responsibilities,
to monitor every aspects of the CPA. Each of these
members should be assigned specific tasks, which
relates to the implementation of the peace agreement,
so that when any new round of negotiations with the
NCP commences, that group will have worked out all the
modalities, so that time is not spent on small and
minor things which should be delegated to technocrats
within the movement.

Fourthly, the formation of the National government has
revealed that the SPLM needs to strengthen its
information and international affairs units. The SPLM
should inform on daily basis the international
community and African countries that guaranteed and
witnessed the peace agreement about the process of
implementation of the peace agreement. The SPLM
diplomats should be assigned specific tasks to keep
the world informed about the delays the NCP creates on
daily basis. The Sudan TV and Radio were definitely
supportive of the NCP position on the negotiations
over the positions of GONU and the printed media was
bias, to the extent of disinformation. International
community representatives in Khartoum were daily given
the impression that the Energy and Mining fiasco was
under control and that it was going to be allocated to
the SPLM.

The disinformation campaign was so well organised that
each senior member of the NCP has played his role very
well. Only Al-Beshir and Taha were not allowed to give
any statements over the issue, except when they were
cornered by the independent media, otherwise they
avoided to give interviews. The impression was given
in the media that the chief negotiators from NCP were
Nafie and Khalifa, the reality was that Taha was the
main reference point from the government side.
Everybody else who is who in NCP was asked to play its
role in the disinformation campaign.

As a result, important issues such as peace in Darfur,
the frozen negotiations in the East and the drafting
of the constitution of Southern Sudan were sidelined
in the media for almost a month and half. The SPLM has
always been very weak in its information system. For
the time being, the SPLM will need to collaborate with
the existing Southern private news papers and to start
efforts towards the establishment of a national TV and
Radio in Juba. Such a project would not need lots of
thinking since the South is endowed with experienced
and well trained journalists and technicians.
Engineers could be recruited from aboard to run the
stations, until such time the Southern technicians are
trained. A call from President Salva Kiir and his
Deputy Dr. Riek Machar to the talented Southern
journalists to assemble in Juba to plan for the
establishment of TV and Radio stations that would
cover the whole Sudan, will be sufficient.

These are serious lessons to be learned by the SPLM
leadership, but also are warnings for difficult times
ahead. But what are the real political challenges for
Post-John Garang SPLM leadership? This will be the
topic for the next reflections.

* John Yoh teaches African and international politics,
Department of Political Sciences at the University of
South Africa in Pretoria.

– Website: www.geocities.com/jgyoh