Salva Kiir Mayardit, the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, is planning to announce the independence of the South through a referendum that will be staged in less than three weeks. In the meantime, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is getting ready for the secession phase through a media campaign in the North. The leading National Congress Party in the North and its political leadership, at the head of which is Al-Bashir, should have looked into the reasons and motives that rendered the choice of secession such an attractive one and the unity choice such a repugnant one, in order to set up a situation that would maintain the attractiveness of political and geographic unity in the North after the secession choice was settled in the South. Moreover, after monopolizing power with the withdrawal of the Southern partner to Juba in a few days, the rule in the North should restructure the political scene through initiatives that would include the Northern components, parties and regional sides in the authority. This is due to the fact that the situation is complicated to the point where the widest participation in the authority, along with effective institutional initiatives and initiatives on the ground, are required to defuse the explosive situation in the East, the West and on the border with the newborn state in the South. However, what is being issued by the officials of the ruling party and Al-Bashir, indicates that the attention is on the ways to stay in power, without any consideration for the repercussions of this monopolization over the post-secession of the South phase. The latter tried to elude the responsibility of rendering the independence of the South an attractive alternative, either by blaming foreign sides or by blaming the consecutive authorities that came to power in Khartoum ever since the independence. In other words, they are refusing to draw the lessons from the last six years which followed the Naivasha Accord that called for the self-determination referendum. These lessons are not solely related to the relationship with the alleged Southern partner in the government, but also to the relationship with the Northern groups that were prevented from participating in the authority through a clear and blunt decision. It is also related to the way to handle the solutions leading to the ending of war in Darfur. Consequently, the current campaign of the Sudanese rule is heading in this direction in preparation for the post-secession of the South phase, through the exploitation of more populist feelings in the North and the Sudanese people's attachment to their religion. Indeed, when Al-Bashir announces his determination to change the constitution – which is inevitable following the secession – he is not talking about a change at the level of the authority's structure to embrace the diversity of the Sudanese society, ensure the peaceful rotation of power, provide democratic freedoms, guarantee the expression of political opinions and produce an institutional situation allowing the handling of the crises of the Northern areas. He is addressing the populist feelings which he believes are the basis of his rule. In this context, it was not a coincidence that Al-Bashir equaled between the “implementation of the Shariaa” in the North and the imposition of religious restraints and lashings in order to limit all of Sudan's problems to this populist facet, as though the non-implementation of this method was behind secession at a time when it constituted one of the factors that rendered unity repugnant. Consequently, this method will be the shortest way toward the detonation of all the fronts in the North in the face of the rule whose options will be limited to a masked dictatorship in the name of religion, in the face of the majority of the Northern political forces which are no less attached to religion in whose name Al-Bashir will be fighting them. It will also be the shortest way toward the repetition of the South's experience in Northern areas.
