Periscope :New Hopes for a New Year

Every New Year, people hope that it will be better than the previous one and the Sudanese people are no exception from this human emotion. Because without hope, people will stop struggling to improve human life and may even commit extreme actions that is harmful to the society and the nation.
There is no doubt that at the present the country is facing great challenges on all fronts; political, economic and social and above all the issue of security, peace and stability in some of the states.
But there is a great hope that these obstacles can be addressed through an agreement by general national consensus on a roadmap to resolve these problems.  This is not an impossible task and the Sudanese politicians had done it before.
In 1956 when the differences between the advocates of Independence and Unity with Egypt threatened to turn to a civil war, the political leaders reached a historical agreement to declare Sudan as an Independent state on 1st January1956. And this is not impossible to do again if all have the political will to do so.
The first step should be an agreement by all parties that there is a need to conduct a general dialogue that will exclude no one because the main and major aim should be to discuss and resolve all the serious and chronic problems of the country since Independence once and for all times. Such a dialogue should be fully participatory, transparent not and away from any dogmatic concepts that Leeds to no where or one party aiming to impose its concepts on the others. The discussions should be driven; first of all.  By a fundamental guiding principle which in few words to safeguard and promote the best interest of the nation and its people.
Sudan have all the necessary elements and conditions to become a developed country and a regional power to be reckoned with seriously, politically and economically, by all powers at the regional and international levels .What have hindered the achievement of this aim was that there was no common agreed upon vision since Independence and it is high time to have such a vision. But such a vision means that every one have to reach a compromise with the others visions on the future prospects of the nation and that no one try to exclude the others . The history of many great nations support this assumption and the Sudanese can do it, if as we said above the best interest of the country is our main and above the interest of the party, tribe ideology or ethnicity.
Let us hope that we will be able to do this in the New Year 2012 and Happy New Year.