The Sudanese Political Mind: Between the Dominance of the Leader and the Absence of a Project (1/4)

Echoes of Awareness by Adam Abaker Issa. In the current Sudanese moment, when the name of a 'leader' is invoked, no project is invoked alongside it. It is the person who is summoned, not the vision; the presence, not the program. This is not a fleeting coincidence in a long history of political practice, but a deeply rooted structure in the Sudanese political mind, repeating and renewing itself with new faces and names while retaining the same essence: the leader is the party, the plenipotentiary, the planner, and the legislator. When they are absent, everything is absent, because nothing existed independent of them. This structure is not a product of the current moment. It is the result of a long accumulation of three determinants identified by Mohammed Abed al-Jabri in his critical project on the Arab political mind: the tribe, the spoils, and the creed. These were never abstract concepts, but active forces in shaping consciousness and practice. The tribe shifts loyalty from the state to the family and group solidarity ('asabiyya'). The spoils transform power into a means of acquisition rather than responsibility. And the creed grants the ruler the legitimacy to speak and act when they lack the legitimacy of achievement. However, al-Jabri, while deconstructing the structure of the Arab political mind, was not suggesting an inevitable fate. He believed these determinants were surmountable, and that a transition was possible: from the tribe to the state, from spoils to a national economy, and from creed to opinion. But this transition does not happen automatically. It requires will, awareness, and a project. Herein lies the Sudanese paradox. In Sudan, as Mohamed Saeed al-Qadal notes in his study of Imam Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, 'where the material and cultural base is weak, where consciousness is confined, and where the leader, the ruler, and the cleric play a role in people's lives, the role of the individual emerges in the most prominent events.' Al-Qadal was not speaking of a specific moment, but of a recurring structure. The leader fills the void left by the absence of the institution, and the institution is absent because the leader does not want it, or because society does not produce it. In an analysis of the structure of the Sudanese political mind, actors within parties are divided into three levels: the 'owners,' who hold all the keys to decision-making and are linked by blood or kinship; the 'tenants,' who have limited powers but orbit the owners to polish their image; and the 'cheerleaders,' who possess the ability to mobilize and defend without questioning the methodology of the decision, the financial origins, or the selection mechanism. This description is not mockery, but dissection. The leader in this model is not a leader in the institutional sense, but an inseparable center of gravity around which all political relations turn into personal relations, and all programs turn into loyalties. To these three levels, a fourth, no less dangerous level is added: the 'theorists' or 'makers of symbolic legitimacy.' These do not hold or implement decisions, but they work on producing the language that justifies them. They craft the leader’s discourse and give their practice an intellectual, religious, or revolutionary veneer, turning personal loyalty into a 'historical necessity,' the seizure of power into 'political wisdom,' and the silencing of dissent into 'protecting the experience.' They are often an educated or semi-educated elite who possess the tools of expression but not the tools of planning, selling their pens to the center of gravity and becoming part of the structure of repetition rather than part of a project of transcendence. Mansour Khalid, in his book 'The Sudanese Elite and the Addiction to Failure,' goes further. He argues that the Sudanese elite, in all its spectrums, suffers from a recurring pattern of practices that perpetuate failure rather than overcoming it. He describes the 'political dervishes' as 'people of action without theory,' who repeat slogans as if they were rituals, believing that chanting them is enough to change reality. This is not a moral critique, but a description of a mental structure that prefers movement to planning and noise to projects. The question that imposes itself is: Why does this pattern repeat? Why does the leader always return to devour the project? Part of the answer lies in the absence of a 'collective mind' that could transform into an institution. The Sudanese political mind, as described, remains 'stretched between the intentions of sectarianism and the rise of populism, between the militarization of politics and the establishment of the military institution, between political religiosity and the collapse of the Islamic project itself.' These tensions are not merely situational data, but structural features of a mind that has not succeeded in transitioning from the politics of owners, tenants, and cheerleaders to the politics of citizenship, the collective mind, and the institution. The leader in this context is not just a person. It is a metaphor for the absence of a project. When the project is absent, people need someone to embody meaning for them. And when the project is absent, the leader becomes the meaning. This is the trap. Because the leader dies, is ousted, or turns against themselves, and everything falls with them. The project, if it existed, would be capable of surviving. But the absent project leaves only a void, and the void is filled by nothing but another leader, or war. In the end, it is not a matter of names. It is not a matter of who leads, but a matter of what is being built. The Sudanese political mind, if it wishes to emerge from its vicious cycle, needs a radical transition: from personal loyalty to institutional belonging, from spoils to economy, and from employed creed to free opinion. This is not a slogan, but a condition for survival. Because the leader, in the end, eats the project, and then eats themselves. And what remains is Sudan, waiting for those who build it, not those who rule it.