A Reading of Zuhair Osman (Abu al-Zahraa)’s Article “When Sudan Recovers: From the Struggle of the

02:06 AM October, 08 2026

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Complementing, Not Confronting — A Response Series

From Changing the Rule to Engineering the Rule

A Reading of Zuhair Osman (Abu al-Zahraa)’s Article “When Sudan Recovers: From the Struggle of the Gun to the Struggle of the Mind”

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

October 2026

Introduction: An Article That Begins in Satire and Ends in Construction

On 6 October 2026, Mr. Zuhair Osman published on the SudaneseOnline forum the kind of article one reads twice: once for its bitter laughter, and once for reflection. The satire in its first half is no mere ornament but a sharp diagnostic instrument. When the author writes that “we change governments with the same enthusiasm with which we change our old soup, but we do not change the rule,” he compresses seventy years of going in circles into a single sentence. In its second half the article turns from satire to construction, drawing a prioritised “road map out of the tunnel”: end the war; build trust; form a civilian transitional government with defined tasks; convene an inclusive constitutional conference, with security reform running in parallel; then transitional justice; then the economy; then a free press; and, finally, elections.

This reading does not seek to dispute any of that. It pauses at the point where the article moves from diagnosis to construction and asks, alongside the author, the question that immediately follows: if the problem lies in “the rule” rather than in governments, who changes the rule, with what tools, and in what order؟ That is precisely the question the Charter of Salvation and State-Building, and its Activation Protocol, have tried to answer with named mechanisms. We offer what follows in the spirit of this series: complementing, not confronting.

1. Where We Converge: A Diagnosis We Fully Endorse

The article meets the Charter on several essential points that deserve to be affirmed before any discussion of gaps:

The rule, not the government. This is the founding thesis of the Charter itself. The problem was never the name of the regime, civilian or military, but a model of legitimacy that descends from a centre monopolising decision-making, representation and resources, and then distributes them to the peripheries as far as the balance of power allows.
“The law of violence” as an incentive structure. When the author describes “a politics that rewards those who disrupt life more than those who improve it,” he is describing not corrupt morals so much as a system of incentives. That distinction is the Charter’s point of entry: incentives are not changed by exhortation, but by re-engineering what is rewarded and what is penalised.
A peace that knows the road to the village. The author’s insistence that restarting agriculture, opening roads and repairing water and electricity “is politics itself” comes very close to what the Charter calls ascending functional legitimacy: legitimacy built from the capacity to serve and genuinely represent people in the peripheries, not from holding power at the centre.
“The tribe is not a ministry of defence.” The distinction between the tribe as a social fabric of solidarity and belonging, and “the militarisation of the tribe and the politicisation of communal belonging” as the real problem, is a precise one. It accords with the Charter’s choice to base representation on place rather than lineage.
Justice without vengeance, reconciliation without impunity. The author’s phrase “reconciliation does not mean impunity, and justice does not mean burning the country” could almost serve as a summary of the logic behind the Charter’s three-tier transitional justice.
Elections are no magic wand. His image of a ballot box placed “in a street ruled by guns” is an eloquent rendering of a truth familiar to every student of transitions.
The courage of civilian self-criticism. In calling on civilian forces to “look in the mirror a little” lest they become “small political tribes,” the author says what many avoid saying, and points to a crisis of representation no less dangerous than the crisis of arms.
This is, on the whole, a sound diagnosis. What follows is not an objection to it but an attempt to turn some of its “oughts” into “hows,” at the points where the article seems to us to stop at the threshold of mechanism.

2. The Question Before the Road Map: Who Can Change the Rule؟

The article asks the armed man to give up what makes him a “VIP,” the mobiliser to surrender his weight on the scale, and the road-blocker to stop being “the bearer of a great national cause.” Yet all of these are beneficiaries of the existing rule, and they will not abandon its gains because an eloquent article persuaded them that persuasion is nobler than intimidation. Here lies the paradox the road map does not resolve: every step in it, from the truce to the constitutional conference, requires someone to convene it, someone to sit at its table, and someone with the legitimacy to name its transitional government. If that question is left open, the old rule will answer it: whoever holds the gun sits down, and whoever commands the crowd speaks.

The Charter offers a three-layered answer:

A call issued from acknowledged insufficiency, not from a claimed mandate. Chapter One of the Activation Protocol addresses the dilemma of “who convenes” by redefining the first call itself. The body qualified to issue it is not the one claiming the largest stock of prior legitimacy, whether historical or battlefield-based, but the one that openly admits it holds no comprehensive mandate and assigns itself a limited, functional role: facilitating local founding assemblies, not speaking in anyone’s name. The first call thus becomes “a call to test the call,” not a final declaration of representation. This, in our view, is the institutional answer to the “small political tribes” the author criticises: what turns a civilian organisation into a tribe is its claim to a representation that has never been tested.
Confining the role of armed parties. The Charter (Part Four, Section Four) provides that the role of military parties in the transitional authority is limited to the ceasefire, security arrangements, and the integration and demobilisation tracks, with no hand in political or legislative decision-making. This is the practical application of the author’s refusal to let weapons serve as “a free ticket to the negotiating table”: the gun has a seat on the file of guns, and nowhere else.
A caretaker body, not a power-sharing government. The Charter shares the author’s rejection of a “chair-sharing party,” but adds an answer to the question of who names the transitional government. Until representation ascending from below is complete, affairs are run by a small transitional body of non-partisan professionals, named by cross-regional consensus among the civilian and community forces that have signed the Charter, and accountable to the first ascending representative body to be formed. The convening body may not turn itself into that caretaker body or monopolise the naming of its members: its function is to facilitate, not to inherit.
3. From Sequence to Simultaneity

The road map the article proposes is sequential: each stage waits for the previous one to be completed. This ordering is understandable and logical on its face, but Sudanese and comparative experience raise three observations about it, which the Charter addresses with a different logic.

First: justice cannot wait. The article places transitional justice after the constitutional conference and security reform. The danger is that the interval between a ceasefire and the start of justice has historically been the very space in which armed parties reposition themselves, evidence is lost, and the living memory of victims fades. The Charter (Part Four, Section Three) therefore insists that transitional justice mechanisms, above all the documentation of violations and the protection of witnesses, begin immediately with the ceasefire, not after it. The practical mechanism is available without waiting for any central structure: local reconciliation councils, the first tier of the three-tier system, begin documenting at once, to evidentiary standards that allow later use before the higher tiers.

Second: the economy is not a later stage. The author rightly says that economic recovery “is politics itself,” yet places it after transitional justice in his road map. Chapter Two of the Protocol proposes, in place of the question “which comes first؟”, a “simultaneous minimum.” Transitional justice needs funding it cannot have without financial sovereignty; financial sovereignty needs public legitimacy it cannot have without a visible justice process. Both tracks therefore start together from day one: local documentation of violations on one side, initial tracing and freezing of the most visible assets and networks on the other, while the independent body for the governance of gold and extractive resources begins publishing concession contracts and production and export volumes (Charter, Part Six, Section Three).

Third: elections at the end of the map may mean a transition without end. We fully agree that a ballot box cannot be placed in a street ruled by guns. But deferring all electoral legitimacy until security, justice, media and the economy are complete carries the opposite risk: an open-ended transition that stretches according to the balance of power rather than what has been achieved, as our previous transitional periods have shown. The Charter (Part Four, Section Five) addresses this risk with two linked provisions. First, elections are not deferred as a single block to the end; they are held in stages, beginning with local units and moving upward, so that electoral legitimacy returns gradually from below. Second, there is an absolute ceiling of five years from the formation of the transitional authority, which may not be extended on any pretext, tied to five declared and measurable benchmarks; whatever remains incomplete is handed over to elected institutions rather than becoming a pretext for prolonging the transition.

The author’s ordering is thus not discarded; it is transformed from a ladder climbed one rung at a time into parallel tracks advancing at different speeds, under a time ceiling that cannot be breached.

4. When the Gun Becomes a Business

The article captures a telling image: whoever blocks a vital road with a few barricades suddenly becomes “the bearer of a cause.” We would like to carry that image one step further. During the war years, the blocked road became, in many places, not merely an instrument of political pressure but a source of income. This is what Chapter Six of the Activation Protocol addresses under the heading “the shadow-economy gap,” describing the network of “gate lords”: second- and third-tier field commanders running organised levies on trucks, livestock and gold, which have evolved from a temporary means of financing the fighting into a self-sustaining economic structure whose interest is tied neither to the continuation nor to the end of the war, but to the continued absence of the state itself.

This has a troubling implication for the article’s road map: the signature of the parties on a truce does not guarantee that these networks will be dismantled, because whoever signs on behalf of an armed party does not necessarily have real authority over the person collecting at the gate. And if, for such men, the gun is an instrument of collection rather than an end in itself, handing it over in exchange for a political amnesty may in practice mean laundering accumulated wealth without accountability.

The Protocol therefore proposes separating the track of arms from the track of money. Dismantling military capacity is a security file, governed by the integration, demobilisation and restructuring tracks that apply to all formations without exception (Charter, Part Three, Section Two). Accumulated assets, such as real estate, transport companies and exchange bureaux, form a separate file subject to transitional-justice accountability regardless of the outcome of the security file. This complements the Charter’s provision transferring ownership of companies and commercial activities belonging to the regular military and security institutions to the Ministry of Finance or a civilian public authority, with the exception of military manufacturing under parliamentary oversight (Part Six, Section Three). Dismantling irregular levies alone, while the regular military economy remains off-budget, would solve only half the problem. Here the author’s reference to “the military economy” acquires a specific operational content.

The Protocol adds a safeguard directly connected to the author’s hope for a politician who reaches power “by persuading the citizen, not by frightening him”: persons proven to be linked to the war economy are barred from standing for local representation, by a reasoned decision open to appeal before an independent judicial body (Chapter One, Section Six). In this way, a representative seat does not become political cover for the proceeds of levies, and the monitoring tool does not become an instrument of exclusion without evidence.

5. Tribe and Region: How Not to Re-Militarise in the Language of Federalism

The author rightly rejects a federalism that exists “on paper, while all the keys to the treasury, the telephone and the car are in the hands of the centre,” and calls for “a genuine distribution of power and resources” in a federal or decentralised state. Yet the article, having correctly warned against the militarisation of the tribe, does not dwell on a danger latent in the federal call itself: if regional boundaries coincide with ethnic or tribal boundaries, federalism turns from a tool for distributing power into a tool for freezing identities. Belonging becomes a political resource, and elites gain a permanent incentive to sharpen the boundaries between groups rather than bridge them, as Donald Horowitz showed in his well-known study of ethnic conflict (Horowitz 1985).

Here the Fourth Pillar of the Charter (Part Two) offers a specific mechanism:

The region is a geographic-administrative unit, not a tribal entity. The Charter states explicitly that a region is a unit with clear boundaries, and that the compensatory criterion in representation is measured by development indicators specific to the place itself, such as per-capita access to services and public investment and documented years of administrative marginalisation, not by the composition of its inhabitants. Compensation goes to the marginalised place, not to the marginalised group.
Weighted consensus. Fateful decisions (the constitution, resources and national security) are taken by a quorum that combines numerical and compensatory representation, preventing any bloc, however populous or powerful at the centre, from imposing a decision unilaterally without genuine cross-regional consensus. The centre thus shifts from decision-maker to ratifier of a consensus actually formed in the peripheries, which is exactly what the author wants when he asks that the keys to the treasury not rest in the centre’s hands alone.
Re-engineering sovereignty, not dividing it. The Charter distinguishes this formula from confederal proposals, which in an ongoing war could turn military front lines into semi-permanent borders. What is needed is a redistribution of decision-making within a single state of unified sovereignty.
This mechanism extends to the constitutional conference, which the author wants to produce “a new contract, not a new statement.” The article specifies who should take part: the regions, women, youth, political and civil forces, and local communities. But it does not specify how they are to be selected or how decisions are to be taken among them, and these two questions alone are enough to turn any conference into yet another chair-sharing party. The Charter answers both: the conference is composed through place-based representation ascending from the neighbourhood unit to the local, regional and national levels, and fateful questions are settled there by weighted quorum (Part Two, Section Three). Representation of women and youth is secured, to avoid the formal pre-allocated quotas seen at Yemen’s National Dialogue Conference (2013–2014), through corrective thresholds applied at the escalation stage rather than before the free ballot, with the Protocol setting a minimum of thirty-five per cent of ascending seats for each sex (Chapter One, Section Six).

6. Why Do We Change Governments but Not the Rule؟ The Institutional Wall

Let us return to the sentence with which the author opened: we change governments, but not the rule. One aspect of this phenomenon deserves attention because it explains part of the cycle. In Sudanese experience, whenever a regime falls, by coup or by revolution, it is not only the head of political authority that changes; almost the entire executive layer disappears with it. Ministries are restructured, directors replaced by those presumed more loyal, and government departments dissolved and rebuilt from scratch. Every transition, however well-intentioned, thus becomes the occasion for a new institutional collapse. This is why the “building of the state on top of the citizen’s head” that the author mocks recurs with every government: each one starts from zero.

Part Seven of the Charter addresses this malady through what it calls the Institutional Wall: a legal and cultural separation between a political class whose nature is to compete and alternate, and a civil-executive class built on competence and functional neutrality, with legal protection against the politicisation of appointment and dismissal. Chapter Eight of the Protocol develops this into an Independent Civil Service Commission, with published appointment criteria, periodic performance review rather than loyalty review, and a clear distinction between political responsibility for decisions, which is subject to accountability, and functional competence in implementation, which is an asset to be preserved. This design avoids two opposite models: wholesale purges with every transition under the banner of “empowerment” (tamkeen) or “dismantling empowerment,” and the entrenchment of the bureaucratic and security apparatus to the point that it stands above political change rather than neutral towards it.

The Charter applies the same logic of the wall to the issue the author captured in the image of “the civilian politician as a militia sheikh in a necktie” (Part Three, Sections Four and Five). No one may combine command of any armed formation, regular or irregular, with a partisan political position; no military or executive leadership arising from the integration track may serve more than twelve years in total; the offices of head of state and commander of the armed forces may not be combined in one person or body; and supreme command must rest with a civilian authority accountable to an elected body. The author’s refusal to let “the military institution become a path to power” finds here written rules, not merely a wish.

7. The Conditions for a “Struggle of the Mind”: The Public Sphere and Its Funding

The article’s central hope is for political conflict to become a contest “between one project and another, not between one gun and another.” But a contest of ideas does not take place in a vacuum; it needs a public sphere with conditions of its own. The author places “a free press and a civil society capable of oversight” in the penultimate stage of his road map, whereas it seems to us that two of the conditions of that sphere cannot wait.

First condition: distinguishing criticism from incitement. Organised violence in Sudan, as in most wars of identity mobilisation, does not start from an empty battlefield; it is prepared rhetorically: collective classification by identity, the dehumanisation of “the other,” and the attribution of individuals’ acts to whole communities. Chapter Seven of the Protocol proposes an Independent Hate Speech Observatory, formed through balanced place-based representation rather than identity quotas, operating under a public classification methodology that separates legitimate political criticism, however harsh, from identity-based incitement; the criterion is not the sharpness of tone but the collective targeting of a group for its identity. Monitoring intensifies during windows of heightened tension: the founding call, the staged elections, and the convening of the constitutional conference. It is an early-warning observatory, not an apparatus of repression: no central executive body is given the power to block content on the basis of its reports alone, so that the tool for protecting dialogue does not become a tool for silencing it. This design draws on comparative lessons presented in the Protocol with the necessary verification caveats, notably Radio RTLM in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide and the Umati initiative in Kenya ahead of the 2013 elections.

Second condition: who funds the competitors؟ The author speaks of turning the gun into something like a political credit card. But that card has an external face that the article does not mention: funding and direction arriving from across the border, for armed and civilian actors alike. The Charter (Part Six, Section Four) caps at thirty per cent the share of the operating budget of any transitional track or Charter institution that may come from external funding, governmental or non-governmental, and extends the prohibition to any party, political organisation or religious institution receiving binding direction or funding from an external authority. We cannot demand that the contest be between projects and then allow the projects themselves to be written and financed in other capitals.

8. Differing Without Killing: From Pragmatism to Mutual Interdependence

The author closes with a humane image: a Sudan that returns as “an ordinary human being,” that “differs without killing” and “competes without burning the country.” His argument for this is essentially pragmatic: war is slower and costlier, and persuasion more effective. The argument is correct, but it remains hostage to the calculation of interest; should the calculation change one day, and the gun appear faster to some party, the argument falls with it.

The Charter seeks to give the ethics of disagreement a foundation deeper than interest: the principle of al-iftiqar, or mutual interdependence. No party, whether individual, group or region, is self-sufficient, and no component of the Sudanese equation possesses enough legitimacy, resources or expertise to dispense with the others. The army needs popular legitimacy that force alone cannot supply; civilian forces need an executive capacity that representative legitimacy alone does not provide; and every region needs what the other regions hold. The Charter frames this idea in secular philosophical terms, drawing on Heidegger’s notion of “being-with” (Mitsein), Levinas’s priority of the relation to the other, the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and Elinor Ostrom’s work on the governance of the commons; it also finds a living image of it in Sudanese heritage: the nafir, the communal call to collective work. But the Charter attaches two conditions to this principle, lest it become a cover for silencing the wronged in the name of “we all need one another”: the strong must be the first to acknowledge their need of the weak, not the reverse; and that acknowledgement must translate into real effects on representation, resources and power.

In the light of this principle, differing without killing becomes an existential necessity rather than merely a more effective option: whoever kills a partner in the nation demolishes part of the very ground on which he himself stands.

A related principle meets the author’s call for “a new contract, not a new statement”: the Charter’s principle of “refusing completion” (Part One, Section Four). Any contract, however just at the moment it is concluded, loses its justice if it becomes a final arrangement beyond question. Accordingly, no balance of representation or distribution of power is treated as a permanent gain; all are periodically reviewed, and constitutional channels remain open to any group or area that has not found adequate representation. The new contract the author seeks can be protected from becoming just another “statement” only if it remains open to revision from within.

Conclusion: From a Jurisprudence of Life to an Engineering of Life

Mr. Zuhair Osman calls for a transition “from the jurisprudence of the gun to the jurisprudence of life,” and we share that call without reservation. All we would add is that a jurisprudence of life needs an engineering of life: named mechanisms that make the road to power through persuasion shorter than the road through intimidation. Not because people have suddenly become better, but because the rule has been rebuilt so as to reward those who improve life and to make the cost of disrupting it greater than its return.

In this reading we have tried to show how the article’s road map can be completed by these mechanisms: a founding call issued from acknowledged insufficiency rather than a claimed mandate; simultaneous tracks under a five-year ceiling instead of an endless ladder; separation of the track of arms from the track of money; regions defined by place rather than lineage; an institutional wall that protects the state from being rebuilt from scratch with every government; and a public sphere protected from incitement and from externally directed funding.

None of this contradicts the spirit of the article. It is an attempt to answer its closing question: how do we build a state that “does not need its citizens to fear it in order to remain standing”؟ On this common ground, we extend our hand to the author and to all who share this concern, not to replace one map with another, but to complete together what each of us has begun from his own side. The building Sudan needs is larger than any single pen or any single project can carry.