“Conversations” with Former President al-Bashir

I previously resisted the temptation to ponder the removal of former President of Sudan, Umar al-Bashir, from office partly because the incident did not come as a surprise. In fact, for men and women of discernment, hardly is there an event in our world today that should occasion our wonderment and amazement. This is because not […]

I previously resisted the temptation to ponder the removal of former President of Sudan, Umar al-Bashir, from office partly because the incident did not come as a surprise. In fact, for men and women of discernment, hardly is there an event in our world today that should occasion our wonderment and amazement. This is because not a single day passes us by except that we are confronted with the uncanny, the unfamiliar, the un-homely. These are times when, unlike before, infants open their eyes wild at birth, when children grow grey hairs in their teens and when adolescents develop hypertension. These are times when youths copulate with goats in order to become rich quick, when women sell their chastity and dignity as car launderers in the city and men sacrifice their mothers to appease gods of opulence and wealth. I resisted the urge to reflect on the tenure of former President Umar al-Bashir and his consequent removal from office because that event had long been conceived in the womb of time; it had been predestined that Umar al-Bashir would not leave the Presidential palace until his space in the prison had been completed. It had been destined that he would leave power by force the same way he seized power by force. It had been written that he would be given drinks of ignominy and dishonour the type he gave his critics some of whom he sent to the same prison to which he has now become an inmate.

I do not consider the above event extremely uncanny particularly when I remember that prisons across the world are currently home to uncountable number of their ‘former excellencies’; former presidents who ‘retired’ from the palace in order to take up their places in prisons. They ended up in prison-former Presidents of France, Jacques Chirac and Nicholas Sarkozy. He is presently in prison- the former President of Niger, Hama Amadou. They are presently there in prison-former presidents of Pakistan, Pervez Musharaf and Nawal Sharif. He is presently there in prison-former president of Cote D’ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo. When I counted more than one hundred and fifty past presidents across the world who are now in gulag, the removal of Umar al-Bashir from power and his descent into the dark recesses of the gulag therefore elicited no surprise.

However, I was surprised by one event and one event only – the discovery of a large sum of money totaling more than one hundred and thirty million dollars in the home of former president al-Bashir after his removal from office. When the latter news broke, I could not believe my ears. I could not but ask this question: for whom was the former president keeping the huge sum of money? Was it for the Sudanese populace? No! It could not have been particularly at a time the cost of a loaf of bread had gone beyond their reach. Was he keeping the money for his children? No! As at the last time I checked, our brother was still awaiting divine mercies perchance he would be blessed with the fruit of the loins!

Thus I could not but wonder what purpose he wanted to put the money? I could not but wonder whether former President Umar al-Bashir was in another world last year when huge sums of money were discovered in the palatial mansion of the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Tun Razak. Was it the case that former president Umar al-Bashir had thought he had become invincible and that Kobar high-security prison in Khartoum were meant not for people like him?

But what an irony the human life is programmed to be? There you have a new inmate in Kobar Prison in Sudan who, before his forceful removal from office on the 11th of April 2019, had ruled Sudan longer than any other leader since the country gained independence in 1956. There you have a new inmate in Kobar Prison in Sudan who had become the longest-ruling president of the Arab League, as well as the longest-ruling Arab leader apart from the three emirs of the United Arab Emirate and Sultan Qaboos of Oman. There you have a new inmate in Kobar Prison in Sudan who had become like Fir῾awn in ancient Egypt. After having spent so many years on the throne, Fir῾awn began to see himself as God, the Almighty. He began to see himself as the fountain from which river Nile flowed. Eventually his time was up; since his time had been on. Whenever your time is on, it would soon be up!

Now he is all alone in his ‘room’ in the Kobar prison. The former president of the Republic of Sudan has now changed status. He is now Prisoner Number 000. There in the prison, he would begin to appreciate how it felt when the mass of Sudanese citizens was bewailing acute lack of bread and water. There in the prison, the former president, now Prisoner Number 000, shall await his appointment in the courts to answer for sundry crimes that he committed or were committed on his behalf by those powerful Sudanese who stood behind the powerful, the President, to pulverize the happiness of the Sudanese and compound their grim realities and circumstance.

Former president Umar al-Bashir forgot this- that to become president of a country is to enter paradise on earth; to enter paradise on earth is to, as had happened to our progenitors, Prophet Adam and Hawa in Eden, become neighbor to Shaytan!