Sudan's government and southern rebel negotiators are struggling to agree on the final chapters of a peace deal which would clear the way for a comprehensive pact to end Africa's longest-running civil war.
Striving to keep a promise to meet a year-end deadline for peace, the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) said mid-level officials intended to sign the last two of eight protocols today that make up an overall accord to end 21 years of fighting in the oil-producing south.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and South African President Thabo Mbeki, who had been visiting Khartoum, arrived at the site of the talks in the Kenyan town of Naivasha to witness the signing.
All that would remain before the deal took effect was for the top negotiators, Sudan First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha and SPLM leader John Garang, to sign the eight protocols their staff have thrashed out over the past two years.
That second ceremony is expected to be held in the presence of foreign leaders in Kenya in January.
People close to the talks said most of the late discussions today revolved around who would pay for southern rebels integrated into new joint armed forces.
The United States and others have put strong diplomatic pressure on Sudan to wrap up the southern peace, so Khartoum can focus on ending the separate crisis in the western region of Darfur that has overshadowed the much older southern war.
If the final protocols are signed, Mr Garang and Mr Taha will have met the year-end deadline they pledged at an extraordinary UN Security Council meeting in Nairobi last month.
The council has asked the United Nations, the World Bank and others to devise a reconstruction plan, including possible debt relief, for Sudan once the country is at peace.
Mr Taha has said long-term plans would need $1.8 billion in aid over three years, but diplomats doubt any package would reach $1 billion, and estimate $500 million at the most.
The southern war has killed an estimated two million people, mostly through famine and disease, and uprooted four million. It erupted in 1983 when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic sharia law on the mainly Christian and animist south.