INTERVIEW-Khartoum should fund southern growth-Vice President
By Opheera McDoom
KHARTOUM, Nov 30 (Reuters) – The Sudanese government will have to spend more in the south, on top of the south’s 50 percent share of oil revenues, to regain the trust of southerners after peace, Vice President Moses Machar said.
Machar, the second vice president and a southern Christian, also said the northern-dominated civil service was the major problem facing the joint national government to be formed after a peace deal to end the southern civil war, which has claimed more than 2 million lives.
Under an agreement negotiated in Kenya between the central Islamist government and the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the revenue from oil production of about 320,000 barrels a day would be divided roughly equally between the northern and southern administrations. But Machar said this was not enough to develop the south.
“This so-called 50 percent is not very much and will not satisfy all that is needed in the south of Sudan,” he told Reuters in an interview late on Monday. “It needs some injection from somewhere, by the national government in good faith and with goodwill or by the international community.”
Khartoum has decided to implement the wealth-sharing deal from January in its new budget in anticipation of a final peace deal, due to be signed by the end of the year. But Machar said they should spend some of that money on the south.
He said this would be a way for the north to make the south feel part of the country. He also advocated a truth and reconciliation committee to resolve long-standing bitterness over atrocities committed during the war.
Machar, from Yirol about 70 miles (113 km) from Rumbek, the SPLA base in the south, said the civil service was entirely northern and needed to be reformed and integrated with people from other areas of Sudan, to make people truly feel a part of government.
“The civil service is now the problem of Sudan … (it) is wholly northern and the civil service is the government of the Sudan, not the ministers,” he said.
The southern civil war broadly pits the Islamist Khartoum government against the mainly Christian and animist south, complicated by oil, ethnicity and ideology.
But Machar said there were enough educated southerners to govern the vast region.
“If we compare southern Sudan with any other African country we have quite a number of university graduates (although) the inexperience of governance might be there,” he said.
Machar said the resettlement and rehabilitation of the more than 4 million people driven from their homes by the fighting would be the southern administration’s biggest challenge.
Those millions of displaced within Sudan should return home first, with refugees outside Sudan being resettled next, he added.
“Because of the orientation of mind, they are still more related to home than anyone in (for example) Australia, therefore resettling these people will not be so complicated,” he said of the 3 to 4 million people displaced from the south and now ling in other parts of Sudan, Africa’s largest country.