The Workshop Evaluating the Transitional Government’s Experience: An Apology Is Not a Strategy

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

(This is a presentation I delivered on the workshop organized by the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) after the October 2021 coup to evaluate the performance of their transitional government. I came away from the presentation with the conclusion that the workshop’s outcome amounted to what I would call “institutional complacency,” a condition that continues to afflict the FFC. It allowed the organization to exempt itself from undertaking a merciless examination of its own performance, as should be expected of those who squandered a revolution in broad daylight and have since been looking around for a scapegoat to blame for their failure. Because the FFC failed to recognize its active role in bringing about the downfall of its own revolution, we have found ourselves caught in another cycle of “we failed and became addicted to failure,” without understanding why. This is a short road to abandoning hope in change and cursing revolutions as political demons that have brought misery upon Sudan and led it to the brink of destruction.)

• A climate of confrontation emerged during the workshop evaluating the transitional government’s experience, forcing every presenter to defend their paper with all their might against criticism.
• No criticism of the Dismantling Committee escaped rebuttal by the paper’s presenter. One participant objected that the committee had been established under substantive legislation without a procedural law. Another argued that its law had not been reviewed by the Legislation Department at the Office of the Attorney General. A third said that the committee had failed to arrange for the establishment of a holding company, managed by trusted professionals, to receive the recovered funds and movable assets, among other shortcomings. It became clear that responding to these criticisms would have required nothing more than effective communication about the committee’s work during its existence, if we are to accept the arguments made by the paper’s presenter. If such communication was not undertaken at the appropriate time, the omission could have been addressed through a session known as a “retreat,” in which the various parties involved, including those representing the transitional government, could discuss their project face-to-face and as colleagues before presenting it publicly at a workshop such as the one under discussion here.

The workshop evaluating Sudan’s transitional government experience (2019–2021) was held from July 22 to 24 this year. It was organized by Al-Democrati newspaper and the Forces of Freedom and Change – Central Council at the premises of the Sudanese Bar Association in Khartoum.

Anyone who followed the event could only wish that the organizers had adopted a broader format for this evaluation, rather than limiting participation to individually invited speakers while broadcasting the proceedings to a wider audience.

As a result, the workshop suffered from three shortcomings that may have weakened its intended impact and the benefits it could have yielded. The first was that the evaluation resembled a company presenting a report on its own performance. This is objectionable and is commonly described as reflecting a “corporate mentality,” because it encourages the embellishment of the performance under review, distancing the process from the transparency it requires.

The other two shortcomings stemmed from the divisions that struck the transitional period, splitting revolutionary forces into factions, with each group eventually walking away over its particular grievance. Many of them brought this political baggage into the workshop’s discussion sessions. Consequently, fault-finding overshadowed evaluation, and deliberations became characterized by “adversity” and “antagonism,” particularly in the comments made by these revolutionary actors outside the conference hall.

The workshop revolved around papers presented by transitional ministers and other influential figures who had served in the transitional government, each addressing the area for which they had been responsible. The organizers appointed discussants for each paper. This arrangement was bound to create an atmosphere of confrontation, compelling each presenter to defend their paper vigorously against a discussion that, as we have noted, was clouded by the disagreements among the various parties during the transitional period.

The workshop had been convened to assess the transitional government’s achievements, shortcomings, and lessons for the future. Yet it is not in the nature of things for one person to describe a matter of governance as an achievement while another attacks it so severely that it is reduced to something approaching a disaster. One might accept that the presenter considers it an achievement, despite acknowledging certain shortcomings here and there, but not that it should be accepted as a failure.

This was evident in the discussion of the “Peace Paper,” presented by a minister associated with the peace process formalized in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, in October 2020 between the transitional government and two armed movements from Darfur, neither of which was among the largest or most influential armed groups.

The minister presented the peace agreement as an achievement, acknowledging shortcomings that, in his view, did not invalidate it.

While the minister responded to those who discussed the shortcomings of the peace process, he turned a blind eye to those who denounced it as a failure that had exacted a heavy price from the country and its people.

Their criticism focused on the “tracks” established by the peace agreement. These tracks provided benefits to allies of the two armed movements, some of whom were not known to have taken up arms against the government of former President Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir. These allies thus gained political advantages in their respective regions simply because they happened to support one armed movement that chose the path of peace, unlike the others. These gains stirred resentment among other major groups in those regions.

The advantages granted to these allies were at the root of the conflict in eastern Sudan, which has persisted since the signing of the peace agreement. It was a conflict between those who had participated in the distribution of the agreement’s benefits and those who had been excluded, simply because they were not allies of the armed groups that negotiated with the government.

Indeed, the conflict in eastern Sudan was what ultimately undermined the transitional government itself, when protesters blockaded Sudan’s ports and the roads leading to them in protest against the “Eastern Track.”

The peace agreement itself was also behind the recent tragedy in Blue Nile State, where dozens of people were killed. One group had secured influence over the state’s administration because it had obtained that position as a party to the peace agreement and its “Blue Nile State Track.” This angered other groups. The two sides clashed, and calls to repeal the Juba Peace Agreement itself became a political demand voiced by many influential parties as a result of the serious problems that followed in its wake.

Because the paper’s presenter refused to engage in a discussion with those who raised the predicament of the peace agreement and its failure, the political upheavals and bloody tensions generated by the agreement found no place in the evaluation of the transitional government’s performance in the area of peace.

On the other hand, the discussion of the Committee for Dismantling the June 30 Regime (the al-Bashir regime) became another arena of confrontation.

This committee was perhaps the most prominent symbol of the December 2018 Revolution, given that its mandate was to recover funds looted from the state, which was at the very heart of the revolution’s demands. It worked energetically to carry out its mandate as stipulated in the revolution’s Constitutional Document of August 2019. Naturally, it came under attack from opponents of the revolution, and even from some of its own constituent parties.

The questions raised by those assigned to comment on a paper presented by one of the committee’s members brought back much of the criticism to which the committee had been subjected. One could hardly hear even the most sympathetic discussants make more than a passing reference to the committee’s importance to the revolution before proceeding to criticize various aspects of its work.

This reflects the confrontational dynamic inherent in the format of deliberations when they are based on a paper followed by a discussion conducted before a large audience in an atmosphere already clouded by disagreements.

On the other hand, the author of the paper on the dismantling process stood firmly by the correctness of his committee’s position in response to every criticism raised by the commentators. If his rebuttals were valid, this itself pointed to a failing on the committee’s part: even those closest to it within the transitional government had not been adequately informed about its activities. And if the paper’s presenter had successfully refuted the criticisms directed at the committee, then the discussion session itself had effectively cancelled out its own purpose.

No criticism of the Dismantling Committee escaped rebuttal by the paper’s presenter. One participant objected that the committee had been established under substantive legislation without a procedural law. Another argued that its law had not been reviewed by the Legislation Department at the Office of the Attorney General. A third said that the committee had failed to arrange for the establishment of a holding company, managed by trusted professionals, to receive the recovered funds and movable assets, among other shortcomings.

It became clear that responding to these criticisms would have required nothing more than effective communication about the committee’s work during its existence, if we are to accept the arguments made by the paper’s presenter. If such communication was not undertaken at the appropriate time, the omission could have been addressed through a session known as a “retreat,” in which the various parties involved, including those representing the transitional government, could discuss their project face-to-face and as colleagues before presenting it publicly at a workshop such as the one under discussion here.

Perhaps the paper on the performance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the transitional government was the only one that attempted to take the evaluation beyond the confines of that government. In other words, it sought to attribute the transitional government’s foreign policy failures to the nature of the opposition’s long-standing practices under al-Bashir, which had suddenly found itself in government after the revolution.

Most of the discussions surrounding the other papers focused on failures during the transitional period itself, rather than on the long history of political practice that preceded it in opposition to al-Bashir’s government.

The presenter of the paper, former transitional Foreign Minister Mariam al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, said that they were like people who had become involved in a revolution and suddenly found themselves entrusted with governing responsibilities for which they had not prepared. Their many years in opposition had not equipped them to take charge of a ministry that had become little more than a shadow of its former self, because the old regime had distributed powers central to its work among other institutions.

The minister added that she had found no literature within Sudanese systems of government to guide her in carrying out her mission as she moved from opposition into government. This deficiency had compelled her to praise a single book on those systems, written by a senior figure in the al-Bashir regime.

Had the discussion stopped at this point, the participants might have realized that they had perhaps fought a regime without paying attention to the profound changes it had introduced into the structure of the state over three decades, because they had always judged it solely on the grounds of its illegitimacy. And what is built on a false foundation is itself false.

A similar point emerged from the presentation by the representative of the Dismantling Committee, who said that they had begun learning the legal and technical principles of recovering looted assets through what might be called “on-the-job training.” He listed the experts and international experiences they had consulted on this subject while already carrying out their duties.

Had the discussants paused to reflect on the lack of prior knowledge among those entrusted with one of the most critical tasks of the transitional period—stripping the old regime of its sources of power—they might have realized that, despite their long-standing accusations of corruption against al-Bashir’s regime, they had failed to develop the expertise needed to combat it. They were therefore forced to learn the necessary skills through trial and error while already on the job.

Perhaps the most prominent theme of the workshop evaluating the transitional government’s performance was the apology for its failures. Few participants refrained from apologizing to the Sudanese people for those failures, usually accompanied by the familiar phrase: “We are human beings; we make mistakes and get things right.”

That phrase almost renders the apology itself meaningless, because human beings apologize to other human beings precisely because they make mistakes—but they must do so with a clear understanding of what went wrong.

Some went so far as to demand an apology from the FFC leadership from an exclusively moral standpoint, attributing the failures to personal whims and desires.

But the FFC will not be saved in its next attempt at governing, as it hopes, merely by claiming that its members have risen above personal desires. Such an approach overlooks the economic, political, cultural, and governance structures underlying conflict within Sudanese society and even within the FFC itself.

Most of its failures can be traced to its prolonged reluctance to engage intellectually with these structures and understand them after the fall of the regime, when doing so was indispensable.

An apology, like hope, is not a strategy, however good the intentions behind it.