The Sudan Election Countdown
On 11th April 2010 this coming Sunday, Sudan’s first multi-party elections in over two decades will take centre stage. As stipulated in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the elections would give a chance to the Sudanese people to freely choose their own representatives for the first time since 1986. The elected officials would then be able to work on making unity attractive to the Southerners who will vote in the self-determination referendum scheduled for January 2011.
Philip Njuguna Mwanika, Researcher, Environmental Security Programme (ESP), ISS and Savo Heleta, Doctoral Fellow, Department of Development Studies, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
On 11th April 2010 this coming Sunday, Sudan’s first multi-party elections in over two decades will take centre stage. As stipulated in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the elections would give a chance to the Sudanese people to freely choose their own representatives for the first time since 1986. The elected officials would then be able to work on making unity attractive to the Southerners who will vote in the self-determination referendum scheduled for January 2011. The outcome of the referendum will determine whether to remain in a united Sudan or form an independent country.
Observers have noted that elections are seen as a means of ensuring that the CPA had a popular mandate. The CPA is being subjected to a review by the many groups that were excluded from its drafting. Interestingly, during the negotiations that led to the CPA, the northern National Congress Party (NCP) and Southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) were not in favor of holding national elections during the interim period. One could therefore argue that the elections were imposed on the parties reflecting the wishes of the international actors involved in the peace talks.
When the CPA was signed in January 2005, the elections, a key milestone in the peace process, was planned to take place in 2008 or no later than July 2009. That would have given the people of Sudan between two and three years to experience life under some form of democratic and representative rule. With the elections now scheduled for Sunday 11th this month, almost at the end of the CPA interim period and less than a year before the Southern Sudan referendum, one must ask whether the complex and expensive elections are necessary at all. If Sudan proceeds with the elections, can they be free, fair, transparent, and credible? If current developments are anything to go by, one can argue that there is already a democratic closure and a worrying development is the current boycotting of the Presidential elections by Mr. Yassir Arman who is President Bashir’s main challenger. Mr. Arman asserts that his boycott is a culmination of security fears, the continued conflict in Darfur and irregularities in the management of the electoral process system. Mr. Arman was backed by the South Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). Although the SPLM has boycotted the presidential election, it has decided to stay in the race for parliamentary and local elections.
With these current events unfolding in mind, a question beckons: will the elections lead to pluralism and democracy or plunge the country into post-election uncertainties, instability or even worse overt violence? This question might certainly be answered by the risk factors as put forward and other major political risk variables. It should be remembered that the National Congress Party and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the two signatories of the CPA, are still in a deadlock over the population census conducted in 2008. This is one political risk factor that might be re-visited incase any objections to the electoral outcomes were to arise. The census results were to define electoral constituencies, affecting the number of parliamentary seats for which each Sudanese State would be eligible. The SPLM, according to the latest commentaries, rejects this census claiming that the NCP bloated figures for the North, especially for ‘Arab’ tribes in the war torn Darfur, which then allegedly reduced the South’s proportion of the population. As Rebecca Hamilton writes in Foreign Affairs, if one is to believe the most recent census, the “Arab” nomadic population in South Darfur has increased by 322% since 1993, despite drought, displacement, loss of life and conflict that ravaged this part of Sudan in the 1990s and most notably since the Darfur conflict broke out in 2003. At the same time, the “African” population of Darfur has either remained the same or decreased.
Other political risk indicators threatening the very base of a semblance of democracy in Sudan is also well profiled in a report on the Sudanese electoral framework by Democracy Reporting International. It is asserted that the general human rights context in Sudan might not be conducive to democratic elections. Beyond the grave human rights violations of the Darfur conflict and the significant violence in Southern Sudan, there is little political pluralism and media freedom in the North.
Another political risk factor is observed in one of the key post-CPA reforms. This was the removal or at least significant change of the strict security laws introduced after a group of army officers, led by Mr.Bashir and inspired by Sudan’s hardliners, took power in the 1989 coup. The “reformed” law, passed in December 2009, thanks to the dominating presence and number of the NCP in the national parliament, gives Sudan’s armed forces same wide ranging search, arrest, and seizure powers. The only substantial change in the new law is that it shortens the amount of time suspects can be held in detention. Those who oppose the NCP argue that the reforms of Sudan’s security laws do not go far enough and threaten to undermine freedom of speech and a fair playing field in the forthcoming national elections. This consideration might have contributed to the current move by Mr. Yassir Arman, and the UMMA Party as noted, to boycott the forthcoming presidential elections.
The other political risk indicator is seen in the question of Darfur and South Sudan and particularly considering their cultural, demographic matrix and internal considerations. It should be noted that many internally displaced people from Darfur refused to be counted in the 2008 population census or register for the elections in their current places of residence. Democracy Reporting International found that the IDPs don’t want to “vote in their place of current residence but rather for candidates contesting elections in the place of their origin, as they may have a stronger nexus there and may wish for an opportunity to have a say on its political future”. Sudan’s Election Act, however, does not make any specific provisions for voting by millions of IDPs in their places of origin. Those in the Darfur region, where some 20% of Sudanese live, who have registered and would like to vote, will probably not be able to participate in the elections due to insecurity.
In the South Sudan region, there still exists an extremely fragile security environment in many areas. There is poor transport and communication, infrastructure and very limited voter education among the population, most of which is illiterate and will be voting for the first time ever on 11th April. Some analysts also argue that the elections are not logically feasible-as late as this assertion is, calling them “the most ambitious and complicated in Sudan’s history”. Using a mix of majoritarian-proportional representation electoral system, about 17 million registered Sudanese will be voting for the President of Sudan, National Assembly, president of the government of Southern Sudan, Southern Sudan legislative Assembly, and governors and assemblies for the 25 states of Sudan. In the north, voters have to cast eight separate ballots. In South Sudan, where the UN reports a literacy rate of 24% (only 12% for women), voters are being asked to complete 12 separate ballots.
To show how long it may take to cast ballots in South Sudan, United Nations Development Fund for Women organized a mock voting process with women in one village in 2009 and found that it took close to 45 minutes for each woman to cast 12 ballot papers. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Khartoum, on average, “an educated person will need 36 minutes to vote and an illiterate person could take twice as long because they would require assistance. These complexities certainly leave too much room for post-election manipulation or simply technical and logistical irregularities of votes. This could be an escalator of violence.
The purpose of the forthcoming first post-CPA elections in Sudan was and is to give the people a chance to experience life under representative and democratic government and give a chance to elected politicians to “make unity attractive” to the Southerners. With the elections countdown being some few days to come, almost at the end of the CPA interim period and less than a year before the Southerners vote in the self-determination referendum, the elections-with the mentioned strategic predicaments should have been postponed until after the 2011 referendum or simplified and held at this time only for executive positions-president of Sudan, president of South Sudan, and state governors.
The time has practically run out to “make unity attractive” in Sudan as it will probably take a few tense months of vote counting, possible second rounds for presidents and state governors, and contesting of the results that there will be no time to make any meaningful difference before the referendum. Another reason for the postponement of the elections or voting only for executive positions is the fact that, in the case of Southern secession, many of the “elected” institutions would loose their relevance to a degree and new elections would be needed in both the north and south again in or after 2011.
