Nigeria’s Sudan question

By Festus Adedayo

Africa is on its familiar route again. She has become the proverbial serial widow whose mourning and weeping the Yoruba express as Iwo l’eni, iwo lana bi ekun ap’okoje. In serial widowhood, the widow is seen as involved in matricide, until she proves otherwise. Each death of the husband courses tears down her cheeks and cries seem the only alibi of her innocence. Sudan is Africa’s most recent ground for exhibiting serial widowhood cry. Africa, like that widow, appears to have a prowess that killing of her prime children and husband requires.

At the last count, 512 people have been martyred to please the god of ego in Sudan. Apart from that number that has been dispossessed of their lives, about 4,200 more have either been maimed, injured or totally immobilized, with claims that these figures may be a far cry from the actual reality on ground. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also painted an apocryphal picture of the bloody uprising. It said the figure may be far more and that “many more” deaths are on the offing as a result of outbreaks of diseases and total breakdown of essential services.

Sudan is reminding us of the broken cistern-like bloodshed that Africa of the twentieth century was. Of the lot, the Somali conflict of 1991 is remarkable. Sparked off by the ouster of dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre, this resulted in a shift in the balance of power, eventually culminating in a twenty-plus-year civil war with as many as one million Somalis killed. Then, the Rwandan regicide came. In a span of four months, between April and July of 1994, just like the Holocaust, a state-sanctioned hatred and dehumanization of an ethnic group brought to the fore by the murder of President Juvenal Habyarimana, jumpstarted a systematic and brutal genocide. This cost this great country in Africa approximately 800,000 human lives. So also was the earlier two-year war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. From May 6, 1998, when war was provoked by military and police of the two countries who exchanged fire at their disputed border, war raged for two years and came with economic tension, decrease in growth and political upheaval.

Liberia of Samuel Kanyon Doe, Yormie Johnson and Charles Taylor; as well as Sierra Leone, Libya, Somalia, DRC and others were to face theirs as well.

Sudan is back inside its blood-spilling puddle. This pre-historic site which parades ancient remnants of archaeology like the powerful generals. Consequently, all eyes are on the Nigerian government to do the needful and avert a looming tragedy . It is on record that Sudan has the highest number of Nigerians in the world with an estimated number of five million people. Some are permanently residents there and have never been to Nigeria before, while others only school there. The country has one of the best educational systems in Africa and this has attracted a lot of young Nigerians, who go there to acquire a range of certified degrees.

Kingdom of Kush, an ancient Nubian state, is on fire. But indeed, the Sudanese crisis isn’t strictly the subject of this piece. It is just ancillary to the discourse of Nigeria’s education system.

As the Ukrainian-Russia war revealed the underbelly of Nigerian students’ relations with the outside world, the orgy of war in Sudan is revealing yet another ugly one. As the Sudan crisis broke out, it sparked off a revelation that Nigeria has at least 10,000 students and more than five million Sudanese of Nigerian origin who are gilded in Sudan. This was brought to fore as a result of the current conflict between the Sudanese armed forces of Abdelfattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force under the leadership of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

At its usual peremptory best, Nigeria is again in a swashbuckling with death, at the expense of her citizens. With the Sudanese air closed due to the crisis, the trapped students have only the road to travel out of the war zone and board a flight to Nigeria. After what looked like an eternity’s delay, the Nigerian government, according to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffery Onyeama, said it had voted the sum of $1.2 million for the evacuation of the stranded Nigerians from the conflict-prone country. Then, the usual Nigerian malady began. Buses primed to evacuate the stranded students got stuck in the middle of the Sahara desert. Why? The bus drivers embarked on one-man riots because Nigerian officials were penny-pinching the payment for their services. The Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, NiDCOM chair, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, had earlier claimed that the sum of N150 million had been released for hiring of 40 buses for the sole purpose of evacuating these stranded students to Cairo in Egypt. An almost not-dissimilar occurrence reared its head when stranded Nigerian students were to be rescued from wartorn Ukraine. So, the question, aside the Nigerian governmental maladies at grievous moments is, why do Nigerian students keep gravitating towards Sudan’s and other “mushroom” universities when they could have studied in Nigeria? Same question was asked when it was discovered that Nigerian students were trapped in Ukraine, a Third World country like Nigeria, at the beginning of its internecine war with Russia.

That question is currently being asked severally on the social media on confrontation with the share immense number of Nigerian students studying in Sudan. We may need to ask similar question as a collective, if only as a way of bringing ourselves back to the path of sanity.

As such, it is commendable that the Nigerian government did not pay deaf ears to the loud cries of its citizens trapped in the wartorn country and has almost completed plans to evacuate them. Interestingly , this is not the first time Nigeria is coming to the rescue of her children in times of crisis. When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out last year and Nigerians living there were stranded, the present administration went all out to ensure that they all returned home safely.

There are many lessons Nigerians can learn from the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Sudan. For one, we should realize that this country is all that we have. And that when our ships are down elsewhere , we can only run back home for safety. It is one thing to “japa” and another thing to have a safe and secured Nigeria to always return to. This isn’t something to be taken for granted at all, and as such, our country’s territorial integrity and internal security must constantly top the list of our prioritized national concerns.

Another lesson is for those beating the drums of war in Nigeria to consider the wanton destruction of lives and properties in Sudan and Ukraine, if only to cool their hearts and tarry a bit. War never actually solves anything; it only creates problems which may only materialize years into the future. The Headquarters of the General Command of the Armed Forces in Sudan used to be a hive of activities. Today, it has crumbled into an eyesore of ruins. The beautiful city of Khartoum has been deserted. Everyone is running scared , hiding in fear , desperate for the sweet relief of peace.

The bottomline is this: war should never be an option for us no matter the level of provocation. If indeed a war is to be fought in Nigeria today, it should be fought against poverty, illiteracy, corruption, insecurity and sundry issues which have bedevilled us for years.

Zayd Ibn Isah is the Media Aide to the Chairman, Police Service Commission. He can be reached via: isahzayd@gmail. com

It bears repeating that Sudan is one of the most consequential countries in Africa, with a pedigree in antiquity. Located in North Africa, apart from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which shares similar size and large swathes of land, Sudan shares borders with the DRC to its southwest, Chad to the west, Egypt to the north, Eritrea to the northeast, Ethiopia to the southeast, Libya to the northwest, South Sudan to the south and the Red Sea. Until twelve years ago when it was bifurcated into two, with South Sudan going its own way, it was about the largest country in Africa. Even at that, it is still Africa’s third largest country.

Economy-wise, Sudan used to parade one of the fastest-growing economies in the world as at 2010. With top exports that range from gold, groundnuts, other oily seeds, crude petroleum, sheep and goats which she exports mostly to the United Arab Emirates, China, Saudi Arabia and Italy, the most phenomenal of its economic strides is that, in 2021, Sudan was voted as the world’s biggest exporter of groundnut meal with $18.8M exports. However, the secession of South Sudan, which harbours about 75 percent of Sudan’s oilfields, drove the ancient country into stagflation. This resulted in a slow-down of its GDP which fell from US$123.053 billion in 2017 to US$40.852 billion in 2018.

Like Nigeria however, Sudan is ridden with corruption. It is perceived as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It has a very huge hungry population and out-of-school children in the world. According to the statistics of the Global Hunger Index in 2013, the country’s indicator placed it with a value of 27.0 which favourably makes Sudan a country with an ‘Alarming Hunger Situation’ and thus rated as the fifth hungriest nation in the world.

The bulk of what Sudan flaunts today is old glory, education inclusive. Though it currently boasts of around 25 and 30 universities, the state of those universities leaves a lot to be desired. Its basic instruction method of Arabic is off-putting to anyone desirous of western-type education while its requirement of male young men to pass through a system of military service is a major setback in its consideration for schooling. During the reign of Al-Bashir, academic researchers got alienated from Sudan, with the withering of internal science funding. At this time, not less than 3,000 Sudanese researchers were said to have eloped Sudan between 2002 and 2014, so much that, by 2013, Sudan’s studentresearcher ratio stood at a mere 19 -100,000 citizens, or 1/30.

Festus Adedayo is a Public Policy Analyst.