The Ministry of Strategy and the New Year

Dr Hassan Issa Al-Talib
The programme Sudan Tonight, broadcast on national television on Wednesday evening—the final day before the dawn of the new year 2026—hosted Professor Mohammed Hussein Abu Saleh, a strategic expert. Through his appearance, he presented an advanced and necessary scientific vision that addressed the issues of the moment and the requirements of the post-liberation phase, including matters of the constitution, good governance, and balanced development.
The government of Prime Minister Dr Kamil Idris needs to establish a “Ministry of Strategy”, and we propose with full confidence that Professor Abu Saleh should head it. Such a ministry would represent the state’s thinking mind and serve as a national compass for guidance, equipped with the instruments to sense progress and development, and to measure levels of balance and priorities for Sudan in the post–Battle of Dignity era.
This is the necessary move today to address questions of governance and the form and nature of the emerging Sudanese state after liberation. It is an urgent national duty—indeed, the most pressing—that the current government must deliver at this stage to the Sudanese people, in order to free the country from the stifling bottle of miserable administrative failure in which the state has been trapped for seventy years since the departure of the coloniser. That failure led Sudan into all the problems that have hindered take-off and economic breakthrough, bequeathing every form of suffering, fragmentation, the expansion of marginalisation, and the neglect of cities.
Will Dr Kamil Idris’s government rise to the level of this challenge, or will it relapse into the same valleys, depths, and pits that were deliberately and deviously dug for Sudan—into which all previous governments have fallen since Kitchener’s invasion of Sudan and the alteration of the national state constitution that the Sudanese had accepted since the days of the Funj Sultanate in 1502? That constitution was contemptuously abolished by General Reginald Wingate, the British colonial governor, in 1899, without consultation, deliberation, or referendum—at a time when there was neither a parliament nor an elected council, nor anything of the sort.
Instead, a colonial law was imposed on the Sudanese people—drafted by foreign pens and implemented by foreign occupiers—following the defeat of national rule and the suppression of the popular revolution at Karari in 1899. With it came the imposition of an imported agenda that embodied the roadmap and vision of colonialism and global imperialism, serving the priorities of conquest and the perpetuation of external hegemonic powers—an agenda that national governments have failed to transcend.
In general, the establishment of a Ministry of National Strategy would be a true indicator of the seriousness with which the government is acting. It would constitute a recognised benchmark, in line with best international practice, by which the success or failure of any government is measured.
It would also mark the distinction between this government and the repeated, entrenched failures of previous administrative experiments—those of post-military-coup governments, from October 1964 and April 1985 to the chaos of April 2019.
Do those in charge today grasp the significance of this critical juncture, or will they choose instead to remain reclining in the same stagnant and suffocating mire?
This is some of what the Sudanese people await in the Prime Minister’s anticipated address on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of independence.
Wishing you all a happy New Year.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=10077