Sudan Election Diary: the Lonely Voter – by James Copnall
The great Sudanese painter Rashid Diab has a recurring motif in his work of the last few years: a tableau of several women, depicted by the splashy colour of the bright tobe they are wearing, standing all alone in a vast desert. Visit a polling station in these elections, and you may well see something similar: sand, space and not many people.
On the first day of this election, a public holiday, it wasn’t unusual to find polling stations in which the turnout was ten percent, sometimes a lot less than this. At a polling station in Omdurman, located in a school near the house of the late Sudanese politician Ismail al Azhari, only 120 votes had been cast by 5pm on Monday, although 1,990 people are registered there. During the half hour or so that I spent there, more people sat down to drink tea opposite the school than came in to cast their vote.
One photo doing the rounds shows electoral officials apparently dropping off to sleep while they wait for a voter. Others – circulated with some glee by opposition supporters or those not keen on the government – show empty polling stations.
It’s impossible to develop a complete picture of these national elections from a tour of a few locations, or unverified images. But colleagues recount similar scenes from around Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri, and there have been reports of similarly low turnout elsewhere in Sudan too.
You wouldn’t know any of this from state media, of course, and National Congress Party officials announce confidently that the turnout is high. Several Sudanese journalists have also said they have been instructed by the National Intelligence and Security Service not to carry reports on low numbers of voters.
But turnout matters. President Omar al Bashir is certain to win re-election, as all the major opposition candidates are boycotting. The National Congress Party should win all or almost all of the 70% of the seats it has chosen to contest. So the game now is in the numbers: the higher the participation, the more convincing the statement of support for Bashir and the NCP.
If the turnout is low, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the opposition’s appeal to voters to boycott the polls worked. The opposition parties weren’t able to get much of a crowd to their ‘sit in’ at the Umma party headquarters, which concluded their anti-election campaign.
No-shows at the ballot box may simply show a generalised indifference or disillusionment with politics – whether NCP or opposition. Over the last few days I have heard so many stories of people apparently not even aware that an election was taking place – or at least not sure when – that I have to believe at least some of them are true. And would you bother voting in an election in which the result was not in any doubt?
The thoughts of Olusegun Obasanjo, the head of the AU observation team, should be interesting. The AU has been criticised by several Sudanese and foreign NGOs for even sending observers, after its own pre-election report concluded that ‘the necessary conditions and environment for the holding of transparent, competitive, free and fair elections as agreed in the AU principles governing democratic elections have not been satisfied.’
Most Western countries will not consider the election a meaningful statement of support for President Bashir, while the Arab League will probably take the opposite position. What will the AU decide?
James Copnall is a journalist and author of “˜A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts: Sudan and South Sudan’s Bitter and Incomplete Divorce’. He is Editor of “˜Making Sense of the Sudans’.
Election in Sudan–a civic electoral blueprint for the future? One most assuredly hopes not!
A Consideration for Electoral Professionals in the Advancement of the Civic Civil Electoral Process in Sudan a nation roiling in civic social despair.
I suggest in a manner strong to all engaged elections professionals that the social political public civic civil electoral leitmotiv for the calibration of any National/Regional/Local Election be grounded in considering with strict strident urgent attention the following statement uttered by Woodrow Wilson when he was campaigning to become President of the United States in 1912.
“Are you going to vote for a government which will regulate your master, or are you going to be your own masters and regulate the government and through the government these men who have tried to regulate you?â€
The ‘Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad’—better known by its Hausa name ‘Boko Haram’ meaning ‘Western education is sinful’—is an Islamic jihadist and takfiri militant and terrorist organization governed by the gangsterism ethos without any credence to the serene intellectualism of the Islam Religion advanced by the Prophet Muhammad. Founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002, the Boko Haram organisation seeks to establish a “pure†Islamic state ruled by sharia law, putting a stop to what it deems ‘westernization sustained by crass colonialism’.This Boko Haram cult of gangsterism evidenced in the violent abduction of young women from their schools must/ought be considered and regarded by all who value social order; as this abduction of innocent women reflects/refracts in the strongest lack of governance dialectic. School girl abductions reinforce the gross lack of civil civic social order. Public administration in governance must be held to strict account. Innocent young women were seeking only to improve their intellectual social standing grounded in learning in acquiring both academic and practical knowledge so as to enhance their personal lives along with enhancing and strengthening their society and culture in terms of prescriptive social civic civil cohesion. Governments of have a fundamental obligation to eradicate this element of gangsterism shrouded within the veil of Islam using every and all national resources. Anything less must be considered as tacit compliance in accepting this pernicious cult of gangsterism who regard themselves as ‘law’. When an election “is seriously compromised†using both qualitative and quantitative metrics does pose normative queries which are not necessarily easy to reconcile. The salient issue might well be: What can the International Community of Civic Civil Electoral Expert Advisors do in addressing this combustive technical [quantitative] and public policy [qualitative] concern in persuading a National Electoral Commission to step up and take full civic electoral responsibility in investigating [profound] allegations of electoral fraud?The failure of young democracies [ Sudan, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Thailand, South Africa, DRC, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt] has enormous inter-continent civic electoral consequences notwithstanding that the ‘democracy idea’ grounded within a civic electoral matrix eventually and ultimately will be the end state of every nation on earth. This civic electoral ‘democracy idea’ remains a most powerful seductive concept [Fukuyama]. In the long run, democracy is on balance the best political system—-not because it allows citizens essential fundamental freedoms but because democracy as a normative concept enhances transparency and rule of law which in the long run will foster and encourage prescriptive ordinal citizen prosperity—the fundamental ontological essence of ‘civitas’—- essential in pluralistic dynamic flowering and flourishing of values connoting and promoting respect, peace, and good order. Civic Institution Elements grossly lacking in many fragile social democratic societies today.Qualitative Electoral Good citizens who are alert, engaged and educated in the advancement of pluralistic common values should participate in a national conversation and reflect collectively upon the content and character of their shared national identity. In a prescriptive pluralistic society open to engaged polite debate, the motives of good citizens should arise freely; virtue cannot be the product of state civil coercion or servile civic indoctrination.A liberal nationalist conception of civic virtue seems to imply some project of institutional design. The state’s institutions and practices need to be structured so as to cultivate and elevate civic virtue among its citizens. The most obvious realm is that of education. We cannot assume that citizens will fulfill their [civic electoral] responsibilities. Good national citizens are more likely to be the products of just institutions and of active pro-engaged public polity participation.Civic Education involves reconciling an interest in the social reproduction of citizens with three important values.
1. the question of whether civic education might obstruct individual autonomy, by privileging civic conformity over critical self-direction
2. civic education must account for how parents’ interests in raising their children according to their beliefs and way of life can be accommodated, [if at all];
3. any transmission of civic virtue should be consistent with the toleration of difference and cultural respect: civic education, most particular the content of school civic curriculum, must not involve the oppressive assimilation of cultural minorities.
When organized along liberal pluralistic rubric, civic electoral education should/ought be guided by two ideas/concepts corresponding to ends and means. Respecting the ends, the liberal pluralistic nationalist should/ought to promote among future citizens a patriotic desire to contribute to a national tradition. This rules out one method of civic education favoured by many western type societies—a civic minimalism limited to basic political knowledge. Deliberative pluralistic democracy requires a more exacting standard of civic civil citizenship. Civic education should/ought involve an element/form of ‘national’ civic civil education, which equips future citizens with cultural civic civil literacy and which prepares them to participate in critical self-interpretation of the national civic civil culture.The essential challenge for this civic civil educative program process is to ensure that any civic civil education is most sensitive to a normative value of cultural respect, which I believe has not historically been the case in many western civic civil education programs. Moral civic civil dialogue should/ought to be fostered and encouraged among all national participants. The young citizens over the course of their schooling and education should/ought have the opportunity to have multiple encounters with peers from divergent social backgrounds, and in the process forge/create/develop effective and affective ties of common fellowship with their future fellow citizens. Following this education rubric the potential exists in: will these future citizens be best equipped to participate in the kind of national-cultural dialogue conversation that defines a pluralistic national civil identity?In theory, governance – once a constitution is in place – starts with elections. Let the people decide. But in Africa that great line from Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, sums it up: “To the Congolese it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the second forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy… and in a village that’s left halfway unhappy you haven’t heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.â€This is especially the case in countries that are divided by ethnicity. Ethnic identity is deeper and stronger than national identity in many countries. In most, ethnic support in elections means the winner must reward that support by spending money in the region. Elections become a simple numbers game, a competition between ethnic-based parties. The winner takes all, leaving great swathes of an electoral region unrepresented and often ignored by governments as the current situation in Sudan suggests in a manner real and quantitatively calibrated which is grounded upon the lack of a strong ordinal civic civil social culture which is most profound qualitative in form and function.The Civic Electoral Process defies a simple quantitative measurement series of rubric measurement criteria. The Civic Civil Electoral Process is an amalgam exercising qualitative metrics within a quantitative norm of civic civil social cohesion essential if the civic civil electoral process is to be valued, validated in the normative element and most critical respected by the electorate even those who elected not to participate in the civic civil electoral process.