Home  Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem
Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem
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On 9 January 2005 the Government of Sudan and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed a peace agreement after twenty-two years of violent conflict that killed over two million southern Sudanese and displaced another six. Make no mistake this is an historic achievement of inscrutable and imponderable differences, the result of long and tortuous negotiations that could have failed at any moment without intense international pressure from the troika of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the stalwart Norwegians.
It was the vindication of Dr. John Garang, leader of the SPLM, who envisaged a New Sudan of unity in diversity in 1983, a conviction from which he has never deviated during two decades of military victories and defeats, revolts against his authority, and interminable negotiations with disingenuous Islamist members of the National Islamic Front (NIF). His consistency, determination, and patience have been rewarded. He is now on paper the most powerful man in the Sudan as First Vice-President, President of the Southern Autonomous Government, and Commander-in-Chief of his own army. The New Sudan will no longer be an Islamist state but a democratic "one Sudan regardless of race, religion, or tribe" in which the New South will have autonomy, retains its own army, receive fifty percent of Sudan oil revenues, and the right to vote for secession after six years. Those who have worked so hard for so long to achieve this triumph deserve our heart-felt praise, but they have had neither the time nor the energy to realize what they have accomplished or how to achieve it. After the celebrations in the sober light of day the participants awoke to the fact they had little or no understanding of reality in the southern Sudan in their focused determination to complete the Naivasha Agreement |
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 Robert O. Collins, is Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Educated at Dartmouth College, Balliol College, Oxford, and Yale University he has taught at Williams College, Columbia University, and UCSB for forty years where he served as Dean of the Graduate School (1970-1980) and Director of the UCSB Center in Washington D.C. (1992-1994). He has lectured in numerous American, European, Middle Eastern, and African universities and been a consultant to the Sudan Government, the High Executive Council of the Southern Sudan Regional Government, 1975-1983, and Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc., 1981-1991.
Click here to read his weekly Opinion Column... |
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 Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General_secretary of the Global Pan African Movement since 1994, based in Kampala, Uganda and also Director of Justice Africa, based in London. Tajudeen is Nigerian by origin and is resident in Uganda and London. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he gained his DPhil in political science. He was a founder member of the Africa Resource and Information Bureau, London, and has been at the centre of numerous initiatives to promote peace and democracy in Africa. Tajudeen writes and lectures on Africa for several journals and universities. He is Chairperson of the Centre for Democratic Development and the Pan African Development Education and Advocacy Programme. |
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Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem compares the crisis over the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed with the Fatwa issued against the author Salman Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhoolai Khomeini. Neither the West nor Islam has a monopoly on good or evil, he writes, concluding that “…freedom will be meaningless if it is completely unlimited, but living in a society also means that we have to share it with people whose ways and values may clash with ours”.
I was a student in England when the Salman Rushdie affair broke out. Let's refresh our memories. Mr. Rush to Die, a celebrated British writer of Indian Muslim origins, had written a novel called Satanic Versus. In it he repeated one of many insinuations about Prophet Muhammad, sexuality and women.
Apart from the literary types and their allied industry promoters, not many people would have heard of the book, even less would have bought it and fewer still would have read it. Somehow some Muslim clerics got to hear about this book and before you could say Salam Alaikum Muslim Clerics in Bradford (predominantly Asian) were up in arms, calling for a ban on the book and declaring it a blasphemy against Islam.
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Yesterday was World Aids Day. The previous week and the rest of this week is being used to focus global attention on the pandemic and what we all, rulers and subjects, victims and carers, local, national, regional and international actors can do to fight the scourge. Africa, as the continent with the largest number of infected people is rightly getting a lot of attention. 25 million people (almost half of the global total) across this continent are living with the killer disease which has not even peaked in some of the worst affected countries like Botswana, who have an almost 40% infection rate. The gender impact of the disease, the class burden and demographic distribution is even more devastating, with at least one in six children affected. Meanwhile the daily death rate is mounting. Whatever one's view of statistics, its uses and abuses, the stark truth is that our peoples are dying and dying in great numbers and doomed to die in greater numbers and we have to (and can) do something, something very drastic, to arrest the situation. There is no point arguing about how the disease arrived or quarrel with the apocalyptic scenarios. While the arguments may be useful to historians of science and medicine and academics they do not address the problems at hand. Our people are dying. |
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Travelling through Nigeria recently, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem remembers how he was stopped by a crowd of people warning him that bandits has set up an ‘operation’ and were looting passing motorists. Abdul-Raheem assesses the state of lawlessness in Nigeria and the rule of Olusegun Obasanjo, who is moving ever closer to a third term bid and the possibility of becoming a “lame duck president with everything imploding around him”.
These days I have been spending more time in Nigeria. ‘Home', as they say, is indeed the best, but for most Nigerians it must be tough love. It is often difficult for one to say if things are getting better or if one is just getting used to it and lowering one's standards - while increasing one's tolerance levels of unfair situations and injustices on the many fronts of the multiple obstacle race that the country has become. Just when you think things are never going to get worse, Nigeria and Nigerians combine their unique capacity to find ways of digging deeper and sinking further.
The general insecurity across the country has proven so insurmountable that Nigerians seemed to have resigned themselves to it and put themselves on a permanent state of alert, hoping that lady luck, miracle prayers, or some voodoo or witchcraft or a combination of all these will see them through.
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