Not Now…!!
By Al-Tahir Satti
A lazy man once returned home carrying a wooden stake. Boasting to his wife, he said: “I’ve decided to buy a donkey, and this is the stake we’ll tie it to.” His wife, delighted, asked: “So I’ll be able to visit my family riding the donkey?” Enraged, he struck her on the head with the stake: “Are you insane? How could you ride a pregnant donkey?”
In court, the judge found that the animal they had fought over existed only as an idea — in reality, all they had was the stake.
Before bringing back Sudan’s old flag, the people need to bring back the old Sudan itself. It is unwise for the President of the Sovereign Council and Commander-in-Chief to occupy the media and public forums with talk of changing the country’s flag when people are missing the country itself. Yes — if we restore the homeland that has been lost in the conscience of its people, whose resources have been squandered, whose dignity has been insulted, and whose will has been shackled — then the flag will be the least of our concerns.
Rebuilding Sudan on genuine and sound foundations — as General Burhan hopes — cannot be achieved by changing the colors of a piece of cloth, but by changing the concepts and policies inherited since independence until the day of this speech. They must become real concepts and correct policies instead of the false and misleading ones that shrank our country from a million square miles to what it is today.
And not now — we are neither geographically whole nor institutionally complete as a state for the government’s leadership to put forward a matter like changing Sudan’s flag for discussion. Such an issue is unfit even to be a conversation with oneself, let alone among people, even if it is merely a proposal to test the waters or spark the minds exhausted by war and poverty.
It is better that we occupy ourselves — and our people — with thinking about liberating what remains of the homeland. And before that, we must free our minds so that flags and pains are not imposed upon us. Otherwise, our state will be as the poet Barghouti wrote:
O you, forgotten at the bottom of sorrow,
What worth is the flutter of a flag your hands dreamed of raising
If it cannot raise you?
