From tragedy to new nation

Justice Malala What you are about to read is an extremely boring article. It is just not sexy at all. It will not be one of those articles that are spoken about at dinner parties, or which will be googled endlessly and appear in this newspaper website's most popular ratings.

The reason it is boring and not sexy and many people won't want to read it, or even know what it is about, is because it is about Southern Sudan, the country-in-waiting whose people this week finished voting in a referendum to decide whether they begin building a new country or stay in a murderous union with their northern neighbours. If, as expected, the Southern Sudanese vote for secession from Sudan, then Africa's biggest country will be split in two.

Part of the reason why this article will not by widely read is because just thinking about the Sudan tends to give one a headache. Throughout the Thabo Mbeki presidency, whenever that president started talking about his efforts to intervene in Sudan, reporters would put pens aside and take naps. The sheer scale of that country's tragedy was too much: many looked away and hoped that out of sight would be out of mind.

According to the UN, one in seven women in Southern Sudan will die during pregnancy. One in seven newborns will die before their fifth birthday, and 90% of the country lives on less than $1 a day. Of the 9million people living in the south, 85% are illiterate.

When Mbeki and others brokered the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which forms the nucleus of the past week's referendum, more than 2 million people had died in over 40 years of fighting, mostly from starvation and disease. Four million had fled their homes.

Since 1989, Sudan has been under the thumb of President Omar al-Bashir, a man who has been defended by African leaders from Mbeki to Muammar Gaddafi, after the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued a warrant of arrest for him for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Al-Bashir now says he will accept Southern Sudan's vote for secession, if that's what the people want.

So why am I writing about this most painful situation? Well, it is because it matters. Southern Sudan is almost like a start-up country. It manufactures nothing and has been at war for so long, its people have no memory of peace. On our continent, it marks the beginning of something incredible and life-

affirming: we can stop war and violence, and we can begin to build a new peace and a new country.

It is a tribute to Mbeki that he has stayed so doggedly on this mission. The continent and the world should honour him for his role.

The scenes of Sudanese lining up in the capital Juba and across the world, to vote this week, was an extraordinary tribute to the human spirit, and to the ability of diplomacy of the nature engaged by Mbeki and others in Sudan, to bring this terrible conflict on our continent to an end.

The people of Southern Sudan had wanted to speak for so long, and they did. Democracy had triumphed over the will of the northern Sudanese, to stop the referendum.

There is another element. Southern Sudan is extremely blessed in oil wealth. Tristan McConnell of The Nation magazine writes that the Sudan's reserves are estimated to be about 6billion barrels, its production close to half a million barrels a day. "Perhaps four-fifths of that oil lies in the south, but all the pipelines head north towards the country's only refineries, forcing the two to work together, at least so far. Under the CPA, the oil revenues are shared equally between north and south, but what will happen after the referendum is as unclear as the delineation of the disputed border," he writes.

So this is merely the beginning of the battle. The "resource curse", which has turned countries like Nigeria and others into cesspools of misery and corruption, could visit this new country too.

Many commentators have also pointed to the ethnic and tribal divisions endemic to the region and wonder if these can be managed properly. The bloodshed of the past demands that this new country's leadership take a lesson from Nelson Mandela. They must build a country for all people, not just one group. They must work for the country, not for cronies.

What the southern Sudanese have achieved is remarkable. What the northern Sudanese have managed to find in their hearts to let go of, is remarkable. Together they can build a new Southern Sudan.