Sudan: Hosting the African Union Summit
By Namaa Faisal AL- Mahdi
Jan 21, 2006 — The waves of loud sirens drown the empty streets of Khartoum. The sirens, the motorbikes and the police escort, the drum roll welcoming the Sudan’s esteemed guests, courtesy of the hospitality of the Government of the Sudan.
The government of the Sudan has cleared the streets of Khartoum of every beggar, every lay person, every casual worker waiting for daily jobs, every street vendor and for the three days of the summit the word in the street is that they will block all the bridges to Omdurman and all the entry points from the places with the highest population density. The government is planning to announce a public holiday during the days of the summit and to restrict people’s movement in and around the capital. Police in blue and black police trucks mounted with large guns litter the streets of Khartoum and are at all the major entry and exit points of the capital city, they are also placed outside all the major governmental offices and around the governmental palace, police in uniforms are placed around all the major and minor streets of Khartoum waiting around with their police cars flashing swirling blue lights.
A new blue number plate with the word “Ñ ÆÇÓå ÇáÌãåæÑíå” and a golden eagle on the side has emerged, adorning a fleet of brand new Toyotas to serve the presidential tribe and a fleet of brand new black Hyundai Sonatas to serve the African guests. An army of drivers in badly fitted white uniforms serve the new fleets and a brand new set of VIP guest rooms at the airport were opened specially for the occasion.
A Presidential hospitality village has been purposely built to welcome the country’s guests, with over thirty Presidential Palaces and a brand new four lane adjacent road adorned with old palm trees and black and white lined pavements, Shari AL Nil had spent the last year having a face lift, new pavements and new expensive plants sown and re-sown to perfection and so did the Friendship Hall; a new fence, new lighting and a complete reconstruction of some parts.
The Sudanese Television Channel proudly parades the government of Sudan’s efforts in constructing the façade to welcome the African summit, intermitted by an array of national and African oriented songs made in the Sudan in very bad taste.
The cost of the Façade, three days of people’s movement restriction with no due cause equals, a week of robbing licensed street vendors of their livelihoods, robbing daily construction workers from their livelihoods with no indication of a compensation package during the days of the summit equals the violation of our basic human rights. And the first agenda on the AU Summit- Basic Human Rights!
The Sudan main and foremost suggestion to the AU however is: the setting up of an NGO for the promotion of culture similar to the UNESCO, Africa’s wounds need a cultural body to heal !!!! “no comment”
The cost of the construction of the façade is estimated to be in millions of US dollars. Millions of dollars used from the national income of a country where households incomes is estimated to be approximately $93 per capita, a country harboring the highest rates of Tuberculosis infections in the world, where pregnant women die daily of anemia. A country where you have to pay before you receive a life saving salt and saline drip at the national health hospitals and clinics, where you have to pay to share a hospital bed with another patient, in a national hospital that look more like a national sewer than a hospice, stagnant dirty waters, dirt caked pavements and cracked hospital wards with little services or no services on offer. A country with a broken educational infrastructure with the government of the Sudan failing to pay the teachers, failing to pay for new class rooms or the repair old class rooms, schools overwhelmed with students and class room sizes of over 100 students per class, no welfare system, no health support, no support from the government of the Sudan. A country whose citizens earn approx less than $1a day, citizens who have great difficulty in finding work to pay for their daily bread, a rising cost of living with the cost of the basic cereal shorgum to feed a family for one day costing $5, needless to say, without the added cost of coal to cook the shorgum, the cost of a protein source and a fat source, the cost of essential water and essential life saving medicines when some one falls ill. “Essential Vitamins have not been taken into consideration here” that is a luxury affordable only to the rich in the Sudan’s reality. A family’s daily income that can not feed, clothe and provide essential medicines to the family
And the Government of the Sudan’s priority, not new roads to allow the delivery of essential food in areas of need, not the repair of the essential life line road linking the main port Sudan and the capital city Khartoum, not reviving the collapsed health structure or the education structures or the welfare structure but building marble lined residential palaces and playing host to the African Summit.
* Namaa Faisal AL- Mahdi is an educator in the Sudan Open Learning Organization (SOLO), an educational NGO in the Sudan, with HQ in Khartoum, working mainly in providing educational opportunities to vulnerable populations in the Sudan