From Critiquing Failure to Engineering the Alternative A Reading of Zain al-Abideen Salih Abdel Rah

11:06 PM October, 16 2026

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د. علي عبدالله الخليفة طه-UK
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Series: “Complementing, Not Confronting”
From Critiquing Failure to Engineering the Alternative
A Reading of Zain al-Abideen Salih Abdel Rahman’s Call to Rethink
In response to “Is What We Need Preservation, or New Ways of Thinking؟”

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Introduction

In his article “Is What We Need Preservation, or New Ways of Thinking؟”, Mr. Zain al-Abideen Salih Abdel Rahman poses a question that reaches beyond the passing political moment to the root of the Sudanese predicament: why do our political elites fail to produce a project for change, settling for slogans when reality demands ideas, and for holding on to positions when reality demands the risk of renewal؟ It is a legitimate and pressing question, and the writer deserves credit for not merely distributing blame among individuals, but for attempting to trace this failure back to the economic and social structure that produced it.
This paper, part of the series “Complementing, Not Confronting”, does not set out to refute what the writer has said, but to carry it one step further: from diagnosing failure to engineering the alternative. The article closes with a sincere call to “rethink many of the givens”, and here we attempt to suggest what such a rethinking might look like once it moves from a call to a set of tools, through the framework of the “Charter of Salvation and State-Building”.

I. Where the Writer Is Right

The first thing worth affirming is the causal chain on which the writer builds his diagnosis: the absence of industrial foundations weakened the developmental role of the bourgeoisie; the weakness of the bourgeoisie weakened the middle class; the weakness of the middle class weakened the political parties; and the weakness of the parties, together with the state’s retreat from protecting its citizens, opened the door to native administrations, tribal and regional authorities, and to armed movements as a substitute for the party in defending people’s rights. This is a serious structural diagnosis, one that places the crisis where it belongs: in the relationship between economy, society and politics, not in the intentions of actors alone.
The writer is equally right in observing the rise of “executive leaderships” to the top of the parties after security persecution and emigration had drained them of the members who produced ideas, so that the leadership’s concern became preserving its position and the survival of the party’s name, rather than producing anything that might help bring about change. This observation explains much of what happened after December 2018, when it became clear that the elites possessed nothing but slogans.
Among the most precise points in the article is its reference to the neglect of forming the transitional Legislative Council, and its question as to whether the elite was even aware that the Council was the most important instrument of change. So too is its observation that change “was top-down and remained top-down”, which is why, when conflict erupted among the components of power, the public stayed away from it, because it was not their conflict. The writer then concludes with an indisputable truth: a party that lacks democracy within cannot contribute to democratic formation outside; one cannot give what one does not have.
These are all sound premises, and we build upon them. Yet the diagnosis, sound as it is, stops at limits that make the remedy implicit in it narrower than the illness it describes. In what follows we try to identify these limits, and to answer each with a specific mechanism.

II. From the Parties to the Peripheries

The writer reads the native administrations, the tribal authorities and the armed movements as “substitutes” that filled the vacuum left by weak parties, that is, as symptoms of a disease that afflicted the party. Implicit in this reading is the assumption that reforming the parties and strengthening the middle class would be enough to set things right. But the question missing here is: why did the people of Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile or the East turn to the tribe or the rifle, rather than to the party؟
The answer, in our assessment, is that the Sudanese party itself was largely an extension of the state of the centre, run from Khartoum and expressing its priorities, and that the peripheries did not find in it any genuine representation of their grievances. The armed movement is therefore not merely a substitute for a weak party; it is often a protest against a party that was never its own. Consequently, the reform of the parties, however far it goes, will not repair the imbalance unless the regions enter the political equation as founding partners, not as appendages.
This is what the Charter addresses through the “Fourth Pillar”: regional representation as a pillar in its own right within the structure of the state, alongside the traditional pillars, so that a region’s voice is not conditional on passing through a central party, nor in need of weapons to be heard. When citizens in the peripheries find an institutional channel that represents them, the rifle loses much of its justification, and the tribe returns to its natural social size after having swollen to fill the vacuum of the state.

III. From Class to Gateway

The writer attributes the weakness of the bourgeoisie to “the failure to establish industrial institutions”, an accurate description, but one that does not answer the deeper question: why did no productive bourgeoisie emerge in a country with Sudan’s resources, despite the succession of regimes and the diversity of their ideologies؟ Were it a matter of mere neglect, some regime would have remedied it. But the recurrence of the phenomenon across civilian and military regimes alike points to a structural mechanism, not an incidental shortcoming.
This mechanism is what we call the “gateway economy”. Wealth in Sudan has, for the most part, not been made through production; it has been harvested at the gateways: the gateway of foreign currency, of import and export licences, of gold, of ports and crossings, and of government contracts. Whoever controls the gateway collects the rent, whether a ruling party, a military institution, or a commercial network allied with either. In such an economy no one needs a factory; the road to wealth runs through proximity to power, not through investment in production.
From here we understand why the Sudanese bourgeoisie was not only a victim of the state, but very often its partner: a rentier bourgeoisie allied with whoever holds the gateway, with no interest in a transparent state of institutions that would close off its channels of rent. This reinterprets the writer’s entire chain: the problem is not that the bourgeoisie is weak, but that it was formed in the wrong way. That is why the Charter lists the “gateway economy” as the sixth gap in its “Activation Protocol”, and proposes dismantling it through transparency in the management of sovereign resources, independent institutional oversight of the gateways, and the legal and institutional separation of wealth from power. There can be no productive middle class without a productive economy, and no productive economy while the gateways remain open to rent.

IV. From Slogan to Ascending Legitimacy

The writer is right to regard the neglect of the Legislative Council as a failure to understand the instruments of change. But we must ask: what kind of Legislative Council would have been formed, had it been formed؟ Under the logic of quota-sharing that dominated the transitional period, the Council would have been appointed from above, in shares divided among the very forces the writer describes as incapable of producing ideas. In other words, it would have reproduced the top-down character the writer himself criticises, only beneath a parliamentary dome.
The problem, then, is not only the absence of the Council, but the direction in which legitimacy is built. In the Sudanese experience, legitimacy has always been conferred from above, by revolution, coup or political agreement, and then imposed upon the base. The Charter proposes reversing this direction through “ascending functional legitimacy”: legitimacy that begins with local and service councils close to people’s lives, is earned through tangible performance, and then rises layer by layer to the national level. In this way the Legislative Council becomes the fruit of grassroots construction rather than a substitute for it, drawing its authority from those it actually represents, not from those who distributed its seats.
In this context we differ slightly with the writer in his assessment of livelihood demands. He sees the confinement of change to demands for “livelihood and services” as a sign that pragmatism has taken over and that ideas have disappeared. We see these demands not as the opposite of political thought, but as potentially its firmest point of entry. A citizen who encounters the state in clean water, a school, a health centre and security develops a loyalty to it that no slogan, however eloquent, can create. The problem is not the demand for services, but the absence of a framework that converts service into legitimacy, and legitimacy into institution. This is precisely what ascending functional legitimacy does.

V. The Balance of Power and the Institutional Wall

With striking realism, the writer acknowledges that the struggle for power, whether among civilians themselves or between civilians and the military, “is decided by whoever controls the balance of power”, and that “whenever the balance of power changes, the agenda changes”. Yet after this acknowledgement he says nothing about the nature of that balance in Sudan today. We write while the war that broke out in April 2023 has yet to end, and the balance of power in it is, above all, an armed one.
If the balance of power is decisive, and that balance is held by the rifle, then any talk of reforming the parties or renewing political discourse remains suspended in mid-air until it answers the question: how does the country move from the rule of the rifle to the rule of institutions؟ This is the question the Charter seeks to answer through the “Institutional Wall”: a strict constitutional and institutional separation between the military establishment on one side, and political decision-making and economic activity on the other, so that arms become a route neither to power nor to wealth. And through the “Transitional Bridge Initiative”, which proposes a graduated path across the transitional period without creating a vacuum to be filled by the most prepared armed force, as has happened time and again.
What the writer warns against, a vacuum “filled by new alternative forces”, cannot be prevented by renewing discourse alone, but by building the wall that stops the rifle from becoming that alternative force.

VI. Totalitarian Culture Is Not Dismantled by Exhortation Alone

The writer concludes that the Sudanese political mind “needs to rethink many of the givens” it has absorbed through living with totalitarian culture. This is true, but culture does not change because we call for it to change. Culture is shaped by repeated practice within institutions that reward certain behaviour and penalise its opposite. If institutions continue to reward loyalty and proximity to the gateway, the culture will remain totalitarian no matter how many articles call for democracy. Ascending legitimacy, in this sense, is not merely a political mechanism, but a school of practical democratic formation in which people learn accountability at the level closest to their lives.
Moreover, part of totalitarian culture feeds on grievances that have not been redressed. When a social group feels that what was done to it has never been acknowledged and that no one has been held to account, sheltering in the group and in arms becomes more persuasive than trusting the state. That is why the Charter makes “three-tier transitional justice” a condition, not a luxury: justice that acknowledges victims, holds perpetrators to account for crimes, and reforms the institutions that produced them, so that the past does not remain an open wound to be reinvested in every new conflict.
In his article, the writer invokes Antonio Gramsci’s remark about parties that arise to influence decisive historical moments but are not always able to adapt to new tasks and new eras. The citation is apt, but Gramsci did not stop at diagnosis. His remedy, as is well known from his writings, was to build hegemony upwards from within civil society, through what he called the “war of position” and through the organic intellectual bound to his social base, not through seizing the summit of the state alone. This logic is closer to the idea of ascending legitimacy and of the “Grand National Mobilization”, a broad national mobilisation that builds consensus from the base, than to reforming parties from within their leadership bodies.

VII. From the Logic of Domination to Iftiqar

In its final horizon, the article remains captive to a binary of power struggle: civilians against the military, class against class, and a balance of power that settles the agenda. This is a realistic reading of what has happened, but it is not a sound foundation for building what ought to be. Politics built on the logic of zero-sum domination, where one side’s gain is the other’s loss, is the very politics that produced the cycles of coup, uprising and war.
The Charter proposes a philosophical alternative it calls “Iftiqar” (mutual interdependence): the recognition that the components of the nation stand in need of one another, and that no component can dispense with another or build a state upon its ruins. The concept converges with Heidegger’s idea of “being-with” (Mitsein), with Levinas’s ethics of responsibility towards the Other, with the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and with Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the commons. Iftiqar is not a sentimental call for unity, but a realistic principle: the centre needs the peripheries, civilians need a professional military institution, and the economy needs a stability that no single party can produce. From this principle the new social contract the writer seeks, when he calls for “new ways of thinking”, may be born.

Conclusion: Complementing, Not Confronting

In the title of his article, Mr. Zain al-Abideen Salih Abdel Rahman asks: is what we need preservation, or new ways of thinking؟ The answer to which his own article leads is clear: it is the preservation of slogans and positions that brought us here. But new ways of thinking are not enough unless they become new ways of building.
The writer has offered an honest structural diagnosis of the elites’ failure, and we add to it what we see as the missing links: that the peripheries are not a symptom but a founding partner; that the weakness of the bourgeoisie is explained by the gateways before the absence of factories; that a Legislative Council cannot cure top-down politics unless legitimacy is built from the base; that an armed balance of power can only be addressed by an institutional wall; that totalitarian culture is dismantled only by institutions that reward democratic practice and by justice that gives the wronged their due; and that the logic of domination must give way to the logic of Iftiqar.
This is less a reply to the writer than a completion of his article. The question he raised is a question for all of us, and its answer will come neither from a single writer nor from a single framework, but from a dialogue in which understanding accumulates and diagnosis turns into a project. We hope that the “Charter of Salvation and State-Building” may be a contribution to that dialogue, and an invitation to Mr. Zain al-Abideen and to all who carry the concerns of this nation to examine it, critique it, and complete it.
We ask God for clear insight, as the writer concluded, and for sincere resolve to build.

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