“Complementing, Not Confronting” Series From the Call for Consensus to Its Engineering A Reading of

11:00 AM October, 23 2026

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“Complementing, Not Confronting” Series
From the Call for Consensus to Its Engineering
A Reading of William Kodi’s Article “Sudan: Lessons from the Bitterness of History and the Imperative of National Consensus”
(SudaneseOnline, 16 October 2026)

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Introduction

Writing on SudaneseOnline on 16 October 2026, Mr. William Kodi offers an article that is short in length but dense in message: that Sudan, from the Torit mutiny of August 1955 to the war raging today, has remained captive to a single cycle of monopoly, exclusion and rebellion, and that the only way out lies in comprehensive national consensus, justice, and a constitution in which every Sudanese can see themselves. He closes with a question addressed to the civilian and military elites: will they absorb the lesson, or carry on in the same vicious circle؟
This reading does not come to oppose that call; in its essence, it is a call shared by the Charter of Salvation and State-Building from beginning to end. Rather, in keeping with the founding principle of this series, it comes to complement it. The article answers well the question of what we need, but leaves open the question of how it is to be achieved. That second question is precisely where most of Sudan’s noble appeals since independence have stumbled. What they lacked was not sincerity in calling for accord, but the mechanisms that would prevent accord itself from turning into a new formula of domination speaking the language of accord.

I. Where the Article Is Right

1. One cycle, not scattered crises

The first merit of the article is that it reads Sudan’s modern history as a continuous trajectory rather than a series of disconnected events. Its choice of the Torit mutiny as a starting point carries a deeper significance than may first appear: the mutiny preceded the declaration of independence by several months. The crisis of the state, in other words, is older than the state itself; the flaw was not an accident that befell the building but was latent in its original design. This converges with the Charter’s description of the inherited Sudanese model as one built on “descending legitimacy”: a centre that produces decision-making, representation and resources, then distributes them to the peripheries to the extent the balance of power allows at a given moment. It is this model that has produced the cycle of marginalisation, rebellion and coup over seventy years.

2. An indictment that spares neither civilian nor military

The second merit is that the author exonerates no one: the successive forces of hegemony were, in his words, “civilian or military alike.” This point is often overlooked in Sudanese political discourse, where each party tends to lay the entire burden of the cycle on the other. The Charter makes the same judgement when it locates the fault in the direction of legitimacy rather than in the façade of government, “whatever its civilian or military façade.”

3. Rejecting both the rifle and the purely numerical majority

The third and most important merit is the author’s rejection of two paths at once: decisive victory by arms, and “purely numerical democracy” in a country as diverse as Sudan. Many writings content themselves with rejecting the first, implicitly assuming that the ballot box alone can resolve everything. Here the author puts his finger on what the Charter calls “weighted consensus”: a mechanism that combines numerical representation with compensatory representation, so that the peripheries are not left at the mercy of the centre’s demographic weight, nor the nation reduced to an arithmetical equation.

II. From Appeal to Engineering: Seven Axes of Completion

If the diagnosis is sound, the question becomes: what will prevent this call from meeting the fate of earlier calls for consensus؟ What follows are seven points at which the article leaves an operational gap, together with what the Charter proposes to fill it.

Axis One: Consensus without a decision rule

The article states that “there is no alternative to governing the state through comprehensive national consensus.” But consensus is not an emotional state to be declared; it is a decision to be taken, and every decision needs a rule. Who determines that consensus has been reached؟ By what threshold؟ If the intended meaning is unanimity, every party acquires a veto that paralyses the state and gives any armed or powerful actor the capacity to block everything by abstaining. If it means a settlement among the major forces, we return to the very centre the article criticises, for only those who hold power get a seat at the table.
The Charter warns of something subtler still: that apparent consensus may conceal the silencing of the voiceless more than it reflects their fair treatment. How many a “national accord” in our history was, in truth, the silence of those absent from the table؟
→ The Charter’s mechanism: Weighted consensus as the decision rule within the constitutional conference: a threshold that combines the numerical and compensatory criteria, preventing any bloc from imposing a fateful decision on its own without granting any party an absolute veto (Section II, Part 3). Alongside it stands the principle of the “rejection of completeness,” which treats apparent consensus neither as a goal nor as proof of justice, and preserves permanent constitutional channels for anyone who has not found adequate representation (Section I, Part 4).

Axis Two: Components or places؟

The article describes Sudan as “a unique mosaic of cultures, ethnicities and regional identities,” and calls for a constitution in which “all components of the Sudanese people see themselves.” The description is accurate, but the move from it to representation carries a danger the article does not address. If “components” become the units of representation, ethnic belonging becomes a political resource, and elites acquire a permanent incentive to inflate the boundaries between groups rather than bridge them. This is what independent scholarship shows, from Donald Horowitz’s study of ethnic conflict to Mahmood Mamdani’s critique of the colonial legacy of native administration, founded on clan rather than residence.
The paradox is that identity-based quotas, which seem the shortest route to letting “every component see itself,” are among the fastest routes to turning identity into a front line. The Yemeni National Dialogue Conference (2013–2014) offered a cautionary lesson: predetermined quotas for groups ended in formal representation, in which elites chose who would “represent” those groups without any genuine mandate from them.
→ The Charter’s mechanism: “Place, not lineage”: the region is a geographic-administrative unit with defined boundaries, and the compensatory criterion is measured by objective development indicators of the place itself, not by the demographic make-up of its inhabitants (Section II, Parts 3 and 5). The presence of women, youth and the diaspora is secured through corrective thresholds at the points of ascent, not through identity quotas at the first point of voting (Section II, Part 6).

Axis Three: The mirror constitution and the limits of text

The article holds that when citizens find their rights protected in the constitutional document, “the motive for carrying arms is removed and the justification for fighting collapses.” This is a legitimate hope, but it asks more of the text than it can bear, in two respects.
The first is historical. Sudan’s problem has never been an absence of good constitutional texts on paper. Every constitutional project, however advanced it appeared, collapsed when the essential question was left unresolved: who holds the decision of war and peace, the military budget, and senior appointments؟ A constitution that does not settle where the gun stands in relation to it is a beautiful mirror hung in a house without doors.
The second is current. Part of the motive for carrying arms in Sudan today is no longer a grievance that constitutional fairness can redress; it has become an economy in its own right. Armed levies on roads and crossings, gold smuggling, and parallel financial networks are all interests that can outlive any ideal constitution unless they are dismantled with tools designed for them. Those who carry arms because they profit from them will not lay them down because they have seen themselves in a mirror.
→ The Charter’s mechanism: Resetting the military landscape: subordinating armed force to an accountable civilian authority, simultaneous tracks of integration, demobilisation and restructuring applying to all formations, and separating command of the army from the headship of state (Section III). And financial sovereignty: a unified sovereign account for gold, an independent body for the governance of extractive resources, and the transfer of military and security companies to civilian ownership (Section VI), together with dismantling the “gateway economy” by separating the track of weapons handover from the track of asset accountability (Chapter Six of the Activation Protocol).

Axis Four: A peace with no losers… and the victims؟

The article seeks settlements in which “everyone feels victorious in peace, not defeated in conflict.” The phrase is attractive and its spirit is right: no peace can be built on humiliating a party. Yet the logic of “no victor and no vanquished” has served, in many experiences, Sudanese and otherwise, as cover for burying accountability in the name of not disturbing the atmosphere. If everyone emerges victorious, who compensates those who were displaced, killed and raped؟ And if no one is defeated, does anyone remain responsible؟
The word “justice” appears in the article’s conclusion as the “lifeline,” yet it is absent from its structure as an institution. Justice that remains a word in the conclusion is usually deferred until after peace; then the time after peace arrives and it is deferred again, until the evidence, the witnesses and living memory are lost.
→ The Charter’s mechanism: Three-tier transitional justice: local reconciliation councils for community-level violations, a Truth and Reparations Commission, and a Serious Crimes Chamber whose crimes are subject neither to customary reconciliation nor to the logic of amnesty (Section V). More importantly, the mechanisms of justice, especially documentation and witness protection, begin in parallel with the ceasefire itself, not after it (Section IV, Part 3). A peace in which no one is defeated is possible, provided the victims are not the only ones who lose.

Axis Five: “The nation embraces all”: inclusion and its limits

The article states that Sudan “is not the monopoly of any party, ideology or component,” and that the nation embraces all. We agree entirely that exclusion on the basis of opinion or intellectual affiliation is the mechanism that produced every cycle of coup and division. But an inclusion that does not define its limits leaves open a question that soon blows up any dialogue table: does “all” include the entity dissolved by law, which bears documented responsibility for the 1989 coup and what followed؟ If we say yes, we undermine the entitlements of the December Revolution. If we say no without safeguards, we open a door to an exclusion that widens until it swallows opponents it was never meant to reach.
→ The Charter’s mechanism: Inclusion without political or intellectual exclusion, with a single, precisely defined exception: the dissolved National Congress Party as a legal entity and those of its leaders with documented responsibility. It does not extend to mere former membership, nor to the Islamist current as an intellectual current, and it carries an individual right of appeal before an independent judicial body and an automatic sunset clause reviewed upon completion of the Truth Commission’s work (Section V, Part 6; Transitional Bridge Initiative, Part 3). The nation truly embraces all when the limits of the exception are judicial and declared, not political and elastic.

Axis Six: The conscience of the elites, or a structure from below؟

The article closes with a call to “awaken the national conscience among the civilian and military elites,” and with a question: “will the Sudanese forces learn the lessons؟” Here lies the deepest paradox in the text. The article holds successive elites responsible for the entire cycle, then makes salvation contingent on the awakening of their conscience. Seventy years of experience tell us that moral mobilisation, however sincere, has never compensated for a real gap in resources and organisation between those who hold power and those who demand it.
The Charter does not dispense with addressing the powerful; on the contrary, it makes this a first condition. The principle of iftiqār, mutual interdependence, requires that the stronger party’s acknowledgement of its need for the weaker come before the weaker is asked to acknowledge its need for the stronger, and that this acknowledgement be translated into institutional effect in representation, resources and power, not into a discourse that consumes itself. But it does not make the project hostage to the elites’ response alone. In parallel, it builds a legitimacy ascending from neighbourhoods, villages, camps and the diaspora, one that makes monopoly costly, not merely morally impossible.
→ The Charter’s mechanism: Ascending functional legitimacy from the peripheries to the centre (Section I, Part 1), and the Grand National Nafeer as a distributed executive carrier with three levels (Section VIII). And the “adversary gap” in the Activation Protocol: protection from co-optation comes not from the steadfastness of particular individuals, but from a distributed structure that makes the cost of total co-optation higher than its return (Chapter Five of the Activation Protocol).

Axis Seven: Consensus and time

The article says nothing about time, and this is no detail. Open-ended consensus without a ceiling can itself become a pretext for prolonging the transition: each party postpones resolution in the hope that its position will improve, and the transitional authority extends its mandate in the name of “completing consensus.” Previous transitional periods were extended and shortened according to the balance of power, not according to what had been achieved.
→ The Charter’s mechanism: A transition measured by declared and measurable benchmarks, governed by an absolute ceiling of five years from the formation of the transitional authority that admits no extension on any pretext, with elections beginning from local units upward and whatever remains incomplete carried over to elected institutions (Section IV, Part 5). Consensus unbounded by time turns from a means of transition into a substitute for it.

III. A Pause on the Parable of the Garden

The author invokes the story of “the owner of the garden” who swore to keep its fruits to himself and deny the poor, with the result that ruin consumed the garden and all it held. The elements he cites, the oath of monopoly and the denial of the poor, belong to the story of “the owners of the garden,” in the plural, in Sūrat al-Qalam: “when they swore they would surely harvest it in the morning” (Q 68:17) and “no poor person shall enter upon you today” (Q 68:24). The singular “owner of the garden” is closer to the owner of the two gardens in Sūrat al-Kahf, whose story concerns pride in wealth rather than the denial of the poor. This is a refinement that does not diminish the force of the citation; if anything, it adds to its meaning.
For the story in Sūrat al-Qalam contains a detail worth reflecting on in our context. Among the owners of the garden was a voice that warned them before the ruin, “the most moderate of them said: did I not tell you؟” (Q 68:28), yet it was heeded only after the garden had become as if harvested bare. The political lesson we draw, in a civic language that Sudanese of all reference points can share, is that the crisis lay not in the absence of a warning voice, but in the absence of a channel obliging the powerful to hear it before it was too late. This is precisely what the principle of the “rejection of completeness” seeks: that the voice of the peripheries should not remain a moral warning recalled after catastrophe, but a permanent constitutional right of review exercised before it.
Note on translation: the Qur’anic phrases above are the translator’s own renderings of the Arabic.

Conclusion: An Answer to the Question

Mr. William Kodi asks: will the Sudanese forces absorb the deep historical lesson, or continue in the vicious circle؟ Our answer, in the spirit of complementing rather than confronting, is that the lesson will not be absorbed by waiting for consciences to awaken. Many consciences have awakened in our history, only to fall asleep again when the balance of power shifted. The lesson is absorbed when it becomes structure: a decision rule that prevents monopoly without granting a veto; representation founded on place, not lineage; a constitution that settles the position of arms and money before it adorns its pages of rights; justice that begins with the ceasefire, not after it; inclusion with declared limits; legitimacy that ascends from below; and a transition bound by a time ceiling that admits no extension.
In this sense, the consensus and justice the article calls for are not a point of disagreement but a point of convergence. The only difference is that we propose that consensus should not remain an appeal to others, but an engineering that makes monopoly costlier than partnership. When partnership becomes the least costly path even for the powerful, we will not need to ask whether they have learned the lesson; the structure will have learned it on their behalf.
The invitation is open to Mr. William Kodi, and to all who share this concern, to read the Charter of Salvation and State-Building, its Activation Protocol and the Transitional Bridge Initiative, and to contribute to their critique and development. They are drafts for discussion: they do not claim completeness, and they do not accept to claim it.

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