Reporter's Notebook Comments

• There is nothing wrong or incorrect in the reporter's notebook for Sudan, but it is too broad. It offers a brief history of Sudan since 1989, rather than an understanding of how people cope with corruption, nepotism and mismangement. Sudan's economy is so thoroughly informalized and corrupt, to the extent that almost everybody is involved in various "survival" arrangements. Official salaries are so low and so irregularly paid that people cannot survive on them. In addition to their formal employment, most people need two or three informal and untaxed jobs. Public servants are unwilling to perform their normal duties without additional compensation. Teachers and lecturers give extra lessons during their working hour. Doctors take on private patients when they should be working for the hospital or health center. Everybody in the public sector who has access to licenses, seals and letterheads sell them, whereas higher-level government officials make money from deals with foreign exchange or import commodities without paying full tarifs and taxes.
  
  The Reporter's Notebook mentions most of these things, but it fails to give us a sense of how people live with this day in and day out, not because they prefer this sort of system, but because they do not have much of an option. If you are to make a living, you have to be a participant.
  
  
• The writer is correct to immediately highlight the problem of media control in Khartoum. Sudan is at a disadvantage on the communications front even without this heavy handedness. With vast swamps and deserts, a lack of a communication infrastructure or reliable information is one of the reasons why Bashir's National Congress Party has stayed in power so long, despite the deep unhappiness and underdevelopment north, south, east and west of the capital. Khartoum may look like a nexus where the two rivers join, but is in fact an island. The millions living in its internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and others living in hardly better conditions elsewhere constitute some of the most oppressed peoples in the world. Despite the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the war in Darfur has gotten worse, the unpopular government seems to still be invulnerable, and there has been little meaningful political change in the transitional areas between the north and south. The sheer weight of decades of oppression, political Islam in a time of change, and a lack of communication and coordination are some reasons why war-oriented corruption has maintained itself so long, and why so little power has been given to the people of Sudan as a whole.
  
  Corruption in northern Sudan has a different flavor from what the world has come to accept as the typical African elitist "big man" political-business corruption that thrives across post-colonial modern black Africa. Bashir has no personality cult and does not visibly revel in his wealth. The lack of regime change or democracy is the result of enforced backwardness and fear. Like other African countries, Sudan has its resources (oil), but rather than the typical glutinous expenditures seen in Nigeria and (former) Zaire, the texture of waste in Sudan is drier, medieval; less "crazy" or colorful. Rather than simply buying off communities and tribes, this government arms groups (like the Misseriya in the Nuba Mountains and the now notorious Janjaweed in Darfur) and lets them take their own spoils in the dusty wake of destruction.
  
  While sub-Saharan African leaders might expend much energy in manipulating foreign donors for cash, the Bashir Government gains more by disregarding the West as a whole and publicly denouncing the main donor countries in public. The growth of anti-Westernization that has spread across the Arab world has been used to great effect by this government. And although nothing quite similar to the 1992 Holy Jihad that was declared on the Nuba Mountain region (already largely a Muslim population) in 1992 is happening now, religion is still used for its blanketing abilities. Even as the Islamic Darfur region is burnt and bombed on Eid, the Bashir Government avoids accountability partly through the "them andus" Western values that have developed in northern Sudan in rough parallel with the Islamic-Western world division that has so unhappily developed in the past decade. This is an important element in understanding the entrenchment of the NCP in northern Sudan.
  
  Although the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM), now the leading political party in Southern Sudan's Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS), are meant to be part of the Government of National Unity (GONU), the fact that the SPLM has been unable to stop the conflict in Darfur indicates how little real power has been transferred. As the writer correctly points out, the GOSS has admitted that it simply does not know how much of the oil revenue it is receiving. The SPLM has claimed that the Minister for Energy has refused access to existing oil contracts. The National Petroleum Commission was finally established on October 30, a massive 22 months after the signing of the CPA. It still suffers from a lack of clarity over whether it should be a advisory or decision-making body; it is still unclear whether the body, made up of members of the SPLM and NCP, should be independent or not of the national (GONU) Ministry of Energy and Mining, and whether it will have a role in negotiating contracts.
  
  The Southern Sudanese also suffer a lack of (media) information and political analysis. As in Khartoum – or possibly to an even greater extent &nash; the media in Juba (now the capital of Southern Sudan, led by the GOSS) and other garrison towns were fully controlled during the war. There has been a welcome "freeing-up" of Juba TV and Juba Radio since the signing of the CPA and three new radio stations and the Juba Post newspaper have been allowed to actively disseminate news.
  
  However, although GOSS claims to be an advocate of free media and does not appear to be monitoring outputs closely, it seldom fully explains policy changes and other political developments, or how it is spending its budget. How the budget would be divvied up among ministries was released in May, although no one is talking about what has been done to improve the once-rebel, now Southern Sudan national army with its vast cut, or why teachers in two states never received their salaries, although money was apparently deposited in state government bank accounts. The darkness, the same that surrounds so many of Southern Sudan's neighbors, has clouded around the GOSS.
  
  The mood of a divide between a government struggling to establish structures and a population struggling to lift themselves from destitution is illustrated in Juba. The communication system may be poor, but army and government officials have satellite telephones. There may only be the skeletons of hospitals, clinics, schools and housing and thousands of returnees camped in cholera-ridden environments, but money is being spent on renovating politicians' and generals' houses. The roads are terrible but army and government officials (like the UN, NGOs and East African businessmen) have four-wheel drives which speed too close to bedraggled children and kick up dust in the struggling populace's face. The empowered elite are emerging.
  
  These four-wheel drives were at the center of a recent corruption incident which never became a scandal. Two under secretaries and three directors from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning were suspended following the discovery that they had been faking receipts for cars and pocketing the difference. The case will be looked into by the Southern Sudan Anti-Corruption Commission, as soon as it is formally institutionalized. This is corruption at its most simplistic; it lacks the 21st century sophistication of Southern Sudan's neighbors like Kenya and Uganda. The Southern Sudanese, as tired of war as they are and uncertain about the future, would not be surprised to hear of this incident. Ignorant of the political processes that happen (and don't) as they may be, no one in Southern Sudan is naïve. Still in desperate times, the dread is a return to war, rather than corruption.