How did the political opposition and the government fail to understand what is going on in Sudan?

Sudan is witnessing mass popular protests in almost all of the country's cities, the most widespread and longest since the last two popular revolutions overthrew two military regimes in the country. The first in October 1964 against the regime of the team Ibrahim Abboud and the second in April 1985 against the system of Marshal Jaafar Nimeiri. This time, popular protests were driven by the country's scarcity of bread, fuel and cash. Hundreds of cars were parked in front of petrol stations, citizens crowded in front of the ovens to buy bread, while banks were unable to pay the salaries of state workers and depositors on the pretext of lack of cash. These reasons may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but it is deeper than the lack of bread, fuel and cash. New factors have complicated the Sudanese political landscape. The failure of both the government and the opposition to absorb the popular movement on the one hand and the nearest exit scenarios of the status quo is what we will address in this blog.

As the popular movement increases and the momentum of the most vibrant segments of the society becomes youthful, the battle gets hotter on the margins of this movement between the leftists (the opposition) and the Islamists (the government). The leftists have used all the means to overthrow President Bashir's government - which has been attributed to the Islamists - in the past 30 years, but they have completely failed. Now that the popular movement has gained momentum, the leftists have come down strongly using all their cadres and expertise, exploiting popular anger against the government and its failure to achieve well-being. However, they often reveal their papers whenever they inflame their followers with the hatred of the Islamic trend in general. This was manifested in their well-known slogans against the "Kizan", as well as the heavy intimidation of all those who joined the Islamic trend since the days of the Islamic Front!

The Sudanese government, on the other hand, was completely unable to face the truth and act with some reason, but failed to absorb what was happening on the ground. They are not intimidating people from the "Communists" using some of the slogans of the Communists to inspire people that the popular demonstrations behind the Communists! As well as provocative statements by Sudanese officials and the use of violence in the face of demonstrations rather than using the wisdom to make some concessions to absorb public anger. The provocative statements do not increase the fire of the popular movement, but rather a fire.

Both leftist dissidents and ruling Islamists were surprised by a new generation of Sudanese youth born after Bashir's takeover of power, the post-Internet generation or the generation of artificial intelligence. Thanks to this generation, the people have become aware of all political trends. One of the manifestations of the government's failure to absorb what is happening on the ground is that the security forces use excessive force against peaceful demonstrations and mobile phone cameras, which even depict the faces of the executioners. This is why the government failed to fabricate its version of what was happening in the Nuba Mountains and Darfur, The whole of the face of the earth was tossed with Russian-made Antonovs without knowing the Sudanese people, not to mention the international community, what was happening on the ground, and the government always had its own version of everything and people could believe it for the absence of information!

It seems that the government is confused until this moment, unable to present a new speech other than its empty vocabulary of content. It accuses Abdel Wahid Mohamed Nur of the Sudan Liberation Army - a limited Darfurian movement - and accuses the communists of being behind what is going on, while information is available to the people moment by moment about any movement in every city and village. Therefore, the government has lost its prestige completely and its speech has become hopelessly unpopular even for supporters of the ruling party.

It seems that the leftist and liberal organizations that form the political opposition, both civilian and armed, in turn also live in the past and perhaps long stay outside the country has missed the opportunity to recognize many of the geopolitical transformations in the country during the past three decades. They saw that the prey was about to become secular. Most notably Abdel Aziz al-Helu, the military commander of the Popular Movement in the north, as well as Yasser Arman, both of whom represent the symbols of the leftist movement. To the extent that the motto of Islam has been exhausted in Sudan completely, it does not necessarily mean that secularism will be the alternative! The leftist and secular opposition in general has lost sight of the fact that the masses who took to the streets did not come out against ideological or ideological support. In other words, ideology is not on the ordinary citizen's agenda, but rather the slogan of the citizen is "freedom, peace, justice and revolution, the people's choice." Moreover, the awareness among the masses of the tolerant teachings of Islam, apart from the hollow slogans raised by the government, are not easy to jump on to turn this popular movement into a mere advocate of secularism!

So the government's position is getting weaker by the day, and it has already fallen morally after it has ignored the demands of the people as dictatorial regimes do. The political opposition will equally isolate itself whenever it stands against its own agenda and its vicious debate with the Islamists rather than adopting the people's agenda. Faced with this worsening situation and with the growing popular movement, which is exacerbated by repression, the exit scenarios remain very limited.

The demonstrators raised the slogan of "Fall Down" in the sense of nothing but the fall of the government. But in practice the fall of the government will not be so easy and it is not unreasonable to wake up people in the morning to find the government has gone so along the lines of what the opposition wants! On the one hand, it is necessary to receive power in order to ensure security and not to let things go unnoticed until the situation is arranged for rational political practice. The only party currently eligible for power is the armed forces. But there has been a strong attack from the opposition on the armed forces that they have become politicized over the past years, implying that the government must hand over the keys to opposition government! This is not only impossible, but thinking in itself is extremely naïve.

The intervention of the armed forces to secure the situation and ensure the transfer of power is an inevitable matter. The only way to ensure that the government does not circumvent the demands of the people and recycle itself is to give assurances to that effect from the armed forces after extensive consultations with the political forces to form a technocrat government The post-national salvation government that ruled the country for three decades.