Nigeria Content Online

Some 4 million
South Sudanese yesterday participated in a referendum to decide whether
they will remain in Sudan or go their own separate way. It is part of
the settlement under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that saw the
ending of a long civil war, which claimed more than 2 million lives and
wreaked untold devastation on an entire region. The outcome is a
foregone conclusion.

Amicable divorces
of this sort are not unknown in history, the most classic being that of
erstwhile Czechoslovakia, where the Czechs and the Slovaks, following
the collapse of the Soviet Empire, voted to dissolve the union that was
put together by the legendary philosopher-statesman Thomas Masaryk. It
was a separation that was done without the firing of a single shot,
thanks to the statesmanship of leaders such as Vaclav Havel.

Sudan stands at the
vortex of civilisational fault lines; the North representing
Arab-Muslim civilisation and the South representing Negro-African,
predominantly Christian culture. A zero-sum vision of politics was,
however, not inevitable. Like many Sudanese patriots, John Garang, late
president of the Southern Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA) and the
jurist Mansur Khalid shared the vision of a united, indivisible Sudan.
Sadly, succeeding rulers in Khartoum made policy choices that rendered
such prospects impossible.

Throughout its
half-century of independence, the North monopolised political and
economic power while the benighted South was kept in permanent
enslavement. As in Apartheid South Africa, southerners faced systematic
racial, ethno-sectarian and institutional discrimination. The policy of
forced Arabisation and the ensuing terror brought pain on a harrowing
scale. The shameful institution of slavery was a not uncommon
occurrence in the Sudan. Pillage and rapine were carried out on a
staggering scale, with the raping of women a systematic weapon of war.

For decades, the
Sudanese tragedy was swept under the carpet by a global conspiracy of
silence. The West, unwilling to offend its Arab satrapies, turned a
blind eye. The recent discovery of oil has changed the geopolitical
equation. The atrocities in Darfur as revealed by the Prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court touched the conscience of humanity and
gave moral validation to the cause being waged by the SPLA.

The American
historian Barbara Tuchman once lamented that it is folly that rules the
world. Sudan is the cradle of some of the great civilisations that once
flourished on our continent. Nubia, Cush and Meroe flourished in the
North; the South had proud warrior kingdoms such as the Azande, Neur
and Dinka as painstakingly documented by anthropologist Sir
Evans-Pritchard and others. It was an act of monumental folly on the
part of the imperial court in Khartoum to imagine they could beat into
subjection a people so noble and so dignified; ignoring the simple
lesson which history teaches, that no force on earth can keep back a
people that are determined to be free.

The legacy of
misgovernment and tyranny has created a massive humanitarian tragedy.
South Sudan stands closer to what Wole Soyinka termed “the open sore of
a continent” than any region I know. Millions of southerners became
strangers in their own ancestral homeland, with disease and destitution
characterising the life-situation of the majority.

The South has
barely 50 km of tarred roads as compared to the North’s 2,500 km. While
the South produces 85% of the oil, most of the earnings are spent in
the North. Only 2% of South Sudan’s 15 million people possess the
equivalent of a secondary school education. An entire generation has
grown up knowing war, violence and humiliation as their only
life-experience. What is amazing is that a society so abused and so
pulverised still manages to have such life-affirming and warm-hearted
people.

But there are
wounds that only time can heal. The vocation of the leaders of the new
country is to hasten the process of this healing and to lay the
foundations for a just and lasting peace.

With its vast
petroleum resources and rich soils, South Sudan has most of the
ingredients for its own development. The task before the leadership is
to build a prosperous multiethnic democracy based on the ideals of
enlightenment, solidarity and the rule of law. A liberty won at the
price of so much blood and sacrifice must be jealously protected at all
costs.

Some have
inevitably drawn a parallel between Sudan and Nigeria. It is, I am
afraid, a false analogy. We may be a divided people; but the algorithm
of power in our country is not a simplistic matter of ‘North’ versus
‘South’. The North have controlled power for 36 of our 50 years of
independence. But our northern elites have brought nothing but penury
to their own people. They have continued to use religion as an
instrument of terror and mayhem; shedding the blood of so many innocent
souls. Astonishingly, today poverty and beggarliness wear a northern
face. The liberation of Nigeria must, ipso facto, involve the
liberation of my poverty-stricken brethren in the North from the
shackles of naked emperors.

The historian
Arnold Toynbee taught that there are no inevitabilities in history. Our
own country stands at the crossroads. But these are challenges we can
overcome through courage and boldness. Our trajectory need not follow
the Sudanese one.