IT HAS taken 27 years. Or 55 or 111. It all depends on who you ask. As with Irish history, it is hard to know when the south Sudanese independence struggle began in earnest. But finally, after two civil wars, 57 years as part of a British colony and 54 being dominated by the administration in Khartoum, south Sudan will get to vote on whether it becomes an independent country tomorrow.
Ballot boxes have been delivered throughout the region and preparations are “absolutely complete” said the electoral commission on yesterday.
International observers seem satisfied that all is ready for a vote that “marks the true emancipation of the people of southern Sudan”, as former South African president Thabo Mbeki told a jubilant crowd of independence supporters in Juba.
One of the poorest regions in the world, what kind of country it will be is another question. But on the streets of Juba, there is a festival atmosphere, as people take to the streets in what locals are calling “the final walk to freedom”.
On top of trucks, people danced and sang yesterday, as they made their way to the grave of John Gerang, the southern rebel leader who signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between north and south Sudan in 2005.
“Khartoum doesn’t treat us as citizens” said Teresa Benjamin, waving a Sudanese flag, the words of south Sudan’s new national anthem “Blood cemented our national foundation” belting out over the crowd.
“In an independent country, we’ll be treated as first class citizens.”
This has been the major gripe of southerners for a long time. Administered separately under British rule, sophisticated irrigation systems and a major cotton industry were established in the “Arab” north by an exclusively Oxbridge-educated elite with a strong “Arabist” streak.
Meanwhile, any development of industry in the “African” south was largely ignored, with essential services such as schools and health clinics left to Christian missionaries and British district officers, otherwise known as “bog barons”.
After independence in 1956, many southerners felt they were swapping one set of colonial masters for another – an Arab- and Muslim-dominated administration in Khartoum that began to enforce a system of “Arabisation” on the mainly Christian and animist south.
Two civil wars broke out, with two million dying in the second between 1983 and 2005, when the peace agreement was signed. Tomorrow’s referendum is a key plank of that agreement.
However, how north and south untangle themselves from one another is not yet clear.
Oil revenues are currently shared between both sides, but almost 80 per cent of the 490,000 barrels of oil Sudan produces every year is in the south. That oil is routed through Port Sudan in the north though, which means that south Sudan can’t afford to declare it all for themselves.
There are other issues, such as the final demarcation of the border between both regions and how $38 billion (€29 billion) in foreign debt is divided.
But the most pressing problem is the border region of Abyei, where two tribes dominate. They are the Ngok Dinka, affiliated to the south, and the nomadic Misseriya tribe, whose allegiances lie with the north.
Abyei also has oil.
“If there is any trouble, it is going to start there,” says one international military observer deployed near the region.
It has been excluded from the referendum because of the strong disagreements between both sides but, at some stage, it will have to hold its own one.
With more than 200 ethnicities, south Sudan is hardly one homogenous unit either. Although there are members of the major Nuer and Shilluk tribes in government, the Dinka dominate positions, with ongoing land conflicts between the Shilluk and Dinka communities leading to deadly violence over the past year.
South Sudan may be about to turn its back on unity with the north. But it will have to work hard to remain united itself.