Complementing, Not Confronting series Neither Dissolution nor Preservation On the Frame of Referenc

00:08 AM October, 15 2026

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Complementing, Not Confronting series
Neither Dissolution nor Preservation
On the Frame of Reference Dr. Abdullah Ali Ibrahim Asked For
A reading of “Za‘azi‘ wa la Awtad” (Gusts, Not Tent Pegs) through the lens of the Charter of Salvation and State-Building

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Introduction

Dr. Abdullah Ali Ibrahim rarely writes without leaving his reader prompted to reconsider, and his article “Za‘azi‘ wa la Awtad” is of that kind. He does not stop at criticising calls to dissolve the Sudanese Armed Forces; he puts his finger on a deeper ailment: that our elite excels at invective but not at thought, and improvises its positions on the army and the state without a frame of reference against which to weigh its arguments. He cites the late Dr. Haidar Ibrahim Ali, may God have mercy on him, who grew impatient with an activist literature content to lampoon the Ingaz regime, and who called for democratic political action grounded in political education and in trust in the people at the grassroots.
In this series we meet the author at his central demand as partners, not adversaries. He asked for a frame of reference, and the Charter of Salvation and State-Building is an attempt to offer exactly that. Yet the author’s own framework, the African comparison of “political armies”, testifies, when read carefully, to more than he intended. It shows not only that dissolution is dangerous in itself, but also that preserving the army as it is carries a danger of the same kind. This is what we try to set out below.

1. Where the author is right

We begin with what we share with the author, which is considerable and substantial:
His demand that a frame of reference precede the position: no argument about the army and the state can stand unless it is weighed against a coherent conception of the state and of the role of armed force within it. This is precisely what the Charter is built on.
His critique of the culture of the exclusionary “except”: the estrangement between Sumud and the radicals, and between both and the Islamists, has drained the elite of the faculty of dialogue, even within a single camp. This observation sits squarely with the spirit of “complementing, not confronting”.
His historical correction: the ideologisation of the armed forces did not begin in 1989. It was preceded by the May 1969 coup, which embedded first its leftist and then its Arab-nationalist ideology in the army, before turning in its final years to its own Islamic project. Whoever treats ideologisation as a fault warranting dissolution must read the whole of that history.
His observation on the Framework Agreement: it did not call for the army’s dissolution, but for its return to barracks and its reform, and it provided for the integration of the Rapid Support Forces into it. The later call for dissolution therefore needs an explanation that has yet to be offered.
His judgement that the RSF is not a liberation movement in any sense, that it first emerged to suppress the Darfur movements, and that what it has committed in this war, violating people’s honour, property and homes, strips it of any claim to inherit the state.
And the most valuable point in the article is its conclusion that in Ethiopia and Rwanda “the state did not fall, but they replaced one unjust order with another”. That sentence is our point of entry.

2. The comparative framework proves more than intended

The author presents the cases of Rwanda and Ethiopia with care. In the first, an army born of the Rwandan Patriotic Front became an inseparable part of the ruling structure, combining technical competence with business investment and with repression whenever called upon. In the second, an army born of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front was declared national, professional and non-partisan on paper, while being taught that it was “the last fortress of revolutionary democracy”, and was dominated by a group of no more than six per cent of the population, until it split and itself became an arena of conflict.
What lesson do the two cases offer؟ The author reads in them that the state survived the dissolution of the old army because an organised liberation movement with vision and comradeship inherited it, and that the RSF is nothing of the kind. That is true. But the two cases say something else as well: that the disease lay neither in dissolution nor in preservation, but in the fusion of the army with a particular ruling project. The Rwandan and Ethiopian armies were not dissolved armies; they were entrenched, empowered armies, and their entrenchment was the very source of the injustice that replaced injustice.
The real axis that the author’s framework yields, therefore, is not “dissolution or preservation” but “a politicised army or an army bounded by a constitutional wall”. Having rightly criticised one side of a false binary, the article stops there, and does not tell us what kind of army we want if we do not want dissolution. In this way it nearly leaves the reader inside the very binary it criticises, only on its opposite bank.

3. The historical record, from both ends

The author was right to recall 1969, and a faithful frame of reference requires us to complete the record from both ends. The army first took power in November 1958, barely two years after independence. Then came May 1969, then the Transitional Military Council of 1985, then June 1989. Then came the coup of 25 October 2021 against the transitional government, the link closest to this war and most bound up with it, which is entirely absent from the article.
If the criterion of the “political army”, which the author borrows from the literature on civil-military relations in Africa, is a valid one, then the Sudanese Armed Forces have been a political army by that criterion for most of the years since independence. We do not say this as invective: we know what the sons of this institution have given, and we know that today it is fighting in defence of towns and people. We say it because the frame of reference the author asked for requires that we not pick from the record what serves the argument and drop what unsettles it.

4. The RSF: the state’s offspring, not a stranger to it

The author compares the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a movement that came from outside the state to uproot its regime, with the RSF, which lacks its attributes. The comparison is right in its conclusion, but it conceals a more important difference: the RSF did not come from outside the state at all. It grew out of the central state’s policy of managing wars in the periphery by proxy, through arming tribal militias in Darfur; it was then organised as an official force, and parliament later codified it in a 2017 law as a force linked to the military establishment.
Here lies the paradox: the state we seek to protect from collapse is the very state that produced the force now threatening it. This is what the dialectic of centre and periphery explains. A centre that failed to integrate its peripheries into a state of citizenship resorted to proxy arms to control them, and thereby created its own adversary with its own hands. Preserving the structure “as it is” therefore means not only preserving the state, but also preserving the factory that produced the militias and may produce others.

5. Armed rent: the great absence

The author mentions in passing that the Rwandan army combines its military competence with “facilitated investment in companies”, and then moves on. For us this is among the most important points in the article, because it opens onto what the Charter calls the “gateway economy”: control over the gateways of rent, whether gold, ports, trade routes or companies, such that arms become a path to money and money becomes fuel for arms.
In Sudan neither party is free of this. The military establishment has a wide network of companies in industry, trade and agriculture, and civilian oversight of them was among the thorniest files of the transitional period. The RSF, according to several international reports, has a network of gold and cross-border trade interests. Any discussion of reforming or dissolving the army that does not address this rent remains a discussion of the husk rather than the core.

6. A state sustained by its function, not its guard

The author’s concluding argument rests on an implicit equation: dissolving the army means the collapse of the state, so the army is the last guarantor of its survival. There is a truth in this equation that we do not deny in a time of war like this one. But taken as absolute, it grounds the legitimacy of the state in the monopoly of arms alone, and that conception is not enough to build a state.
Against this, the Charter proposes the concept of “ascending functional legitimacy”: the state endures through what it delivers to its citizens in security, services and justice, and its legitimacy is built upward from the local base to the centre, not downward from the bearer of arms to the governed. In this conception the army is one pillar of the state, neither its owner nor its substitute.

7. From “except” to individual accountability

The author rightly criticises the culture of collective exclusion among political blocs. The Charter proposes a specific remedy for this ailment: “three-tier transitional justice”, which distinguishes between levels of responsibility and holds individuals to account for specific crimes they committed, rather than excluding entire currents wholesale. Individual accountability preserves victims’ rights without closing the door to dialogue; collective exclusion does exactly the opposite.
In this context the “Transitional Bridge Initiative” offers a platform for the dialogue the late Haidar Ibrahim found missing: a dialogue that does not require participants to agree before they sit down. The Charter grounds this dialogue in the principle of al-iftiqar, mutual interdependence: each bloc needs the others, since none alone holds the keys to a way out of the crisis.

8. The Charter as a frame of reference

The author asked for a frame of reference, and this is what we offer for discussion, matching each of the gaps above with the mechanism the Charter proposes to close it:
The “dissolution or preservation” binary: addressed by the “Institutional Firewall” (Part Seven of the Charter and Chapter Eight of the Activation Protocol): neither dissolution nor sanctification, but restructuring within constitutional limits that separate political authority from executive-military authority.
The militia factory and the institution’s composition: addressed by the “Fourth Pillar” of geographic representation: place-based representation in the institution’s leadership, not only in its fighting rank and file, with care that it does not become a facade as it did in Ethiopia.
Armed rent: addressed by the “gateway economy” (the sixth gap in the Activation Protocol): placing the economic activity of the armed institutions under transparent civilian oversight.
The legitimacy of the state: addressed by “ascending functional legitimacy”: the state endures by what it delivers, not by who guards it.
The exclusionary culture of “except”: addressed by “three-tier transitional justice” and the “Transitional Bridge Initiative”: individual accountability instead of collective exclusion, and an open platform for dialogue.
National ownership of the solution: addressed by the “Grand National Mobilisation” (al-Nafir) and the principle of al-iftiqar: an internal solution built on the mutual need of the blocs, not on elite consensus alone, with a cap on external funding that protects independent decision-making.

Conclusion

Dr. Abdullah Ali Ibrahim did not write his article in defence of a particular institution so much as in defence of thought against invective. That is what makes it worthy of being complemented rather than confronted. If the “gusts” of dissolution cannot raise a state, neither can the “tent pegs” of preservation as they stand, for they were driven into ground made of successive coups, armed rent, and militias the centre made with its own hands.
What Sudan needs is not to choose between tearing down the tent and clinging to its leaning pegs, but to drive the pegs anew into firm constitutional ground: one national, professional army, protected by an institutional firewall from politics and protecting politics from itself, in a state that draws its legitimacy from its function towards its citizens. Only then shall we be, as the author wished, among those who own the solution nationally, rather than those who improvise it.

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