Sudan: Joy of Peace, Burden of PioneeringSource: Africa Today, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1973), pp. 44-46Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4185323 .

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Sudan: Joy of Peace, Burden of Pioneering

A Special Correspondent

Nobody thought the problems of peace in the South would be so great, Mr. Omar el Haj Moussa, Sudan's influential Information Minister, said in Khartoum this spring. In March last year, when President Jaffar el Nimeiry and the Anya-nya leaders reached an agreement ending the 16-year civil war which had ravaged the three Southern provinces, the major difficulties were expected to be political.

Now the Southerners and the Nimeiry regime have built up a structure of mutual political interdependence more solid than anyone could have imagined.

In Juba, Equatoria Province, the capital of the new, autonomous Southern Region, the magnitude of the effort needed to restore basic economic life to the South looms far larger than political tasks. The problems of resettling the refugees returning from neighboring countries and from the bush are not being met. There must be serious doubt whether the regional Government has either the resources or the administrative ability to cope without far greater help from Khartoum or from outside Sudan.

Mr. Clement Mboro, Regional Commissioner for Repatriation and Resettlement, calculates that his organization has so far dealt with 430,000 people, of whom 110,000 have returned from abroad, while the remaining 320,000 have emerged from the forest and bush.

Mr. Mboro believes there are still nearly 110,000 Southern Sudanese across the borders, some of whom, as tales of conditions inside the region drift out, are hesitating to move, but his major problem is the far larger number who had fled over the past 16 years into the remote bush and forest. Mr. Mboro estimates that there are some two million displaced people in the South in a total population probably reaching five million. Most of the displaced have been barely existing at starvation level; many own nothing but a few rags.

The returnees are being urged to build their own grass shelters. In his office Mr. Mboro displays some simple tools. He explains that, if he can give a family of five an axehead, a machete, a sickle and two types of hoe, they can build a shelter, clear ground for a subsistence crop and survive. A very few tools can be made locally from scrap-iron but

This article is reprinted with permission from The Daily News, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, April 13, 1973, p. 7.

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there is not enough metal for all that are needed. President Nimeiry has promised to get the tools made in the North and asked for samples.

A set of tools costs roughly t3. Mboro reckons he has to supply some 400,000 families. He needs to get them to the refugees before the end of next month, if they are to sow their crops in time - "otherwise, we shall have to feed them for another year." Providing seeds also is a problem. The Regional Finance Minister, Mr. Hilary Logali, has made arrangements to get maize seed from Kenya. The seeds are available - but not the money.

The relief fund target for the South, to be contributed from abroad, was put at $22m. with the repatriation phase due to end by July. Mr. Mboro calculates that repatriation can take up to nine months' longer with full resettlement needing anything between three and five years at a total cost of something like ?50m. His Commission budgeted just over LS6m. for the nine months ending in January. Its income in cash and kind was LS2.4m, while by the end of February it had spent or disbursed materials up to- S2.6m. Mr. Omar el Haj Moussa said in Khartoum, "We asked for too little and the world did not respond as we had hoped."

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Under the peace agreement the central government must pay for essential services at the 1970-71 rate of expenditure, about ?S5.5m. a year; pay grants to local government of about -LS4.6m.; meet allocations under the national development budget of -LS2.9m. for the current fiscal year, and provide a special development budget of LS1ml. The central government has also put aside ES1m. to meet its share of the cost of new projects, but so far none of this has been disbursed, because there are no projects.

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The regional government can collect taxes, excise and con- sumption duties and has the right to the profits on government monopolies, such as sugar producing in the region, but the ad- ministrative machinery to collect does not yet exist. "You can say our income is almost nil," one Minister told me.

Mr. Hassan, Agriculture Minister, wants coffee and tea to be cash crops for smallholders rather than to be cultivated on plantation lines. Most plantations are ruined anyhow. His Ministry has 615,000 coffee seedlings available and a budget of iS50,000 for a coffee scheme, starting with a 200-acre nursery, which needs +LS200,000 for its first phase.

If finance is the basic blockage, the lack of technicians is scarcely less significant. Regional Finance Minister, Mr. Logali told me: "The roads are not bad now, many are passable and we have another 15 graders on the way. Give me 200 more trucks and 100 Land-Rovers and we can keep this region ticking over for three years."

But in fact he could not keep the trucks and Land-Rovers ticking over. At the Juba Motor Transport Department the number of vehicles coming in for maintenance has quadrupled in one year, while there are fewer qualified mechanics on the job than before the signing of the peace agreement, mainly because those from the North have gone home. The population of Juba has gone up from 80,000 to about 150,000 over the past year and prices have tripled; the Northern mechanics say they can no longer afford to live there.

The economic problems strike a visitor to the South most forcibly, but there is also much talk of political rivalries among the Southern leaders. Dissatisfied with their accommodation and the lack of books, students demonstrated against Education Minister Luigi Adwok and beat up a policeman who drew a pistol. Two schools have been closed.

Regional ministers rushed en bloc to Khartoum this month, when it appeared that the People's Council, debating the new national constitution, was introducing clauses too close to Islamic thinking. The Southern politicians are still wary of the North.

"We are not going to run away again, we shall fight for President Nimeiry to the last man," one prominent Southerner told me. "Any group which took over from him in Khartoum will be our enemies. They will either have to conquer us - and they can't do that without Arab help - or recognize a separate South."

The Anya-nya and their leader, Major-General Joseph Lagu, now studying at the military staff college, Khartoum, are still the essential element in Southern politics. At least six members of the regional government are said to be "Lagu's appointees." The 6,000 Anya-nya absorbed into the Sudanese Army and now being trained retain their weapons and are very conscious of their role as defenders of the South.

Fundamentally, though, the Southerners are satisfied with the peace agreement and unrest on this issue seems to have switched to the North.

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