The Shura Council of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) has selected President Omar Al Bashir as candidate for the 2015 general elections on Monday.<\/p>\n
The NCP leadership had submitted the names of four other candidates to the Shura Council: First Vice-President Lt. Col. Bakri Hassan Saleh, former Presidential Advisor Nafie Ali Nafie, former First Vice-President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, and the current presidential assistant, Ibrahim Ghandour.<\/p>\n
Al Bashir was elected with 73 percent of the votes.<\/p>\n
In his speech before the Shura Council on Tuesday, the incumbent president acknowledged that his party had made several mistakes in the past. “We can only blame ourselves and the devil for this.” He said that a committee would be established to prevent such mistakes in the future.<\/p>\n
Hamdi Triangle <\/strong><\/p>\n An observer, who preferred to remain unnamed, commented to Radio Dabanga from Khartoum that the NCP selection process affirmed “the regime’s regional prejudices and racist tendencies, as no candidates from the marginalised regions in the west, east, and south of the country were nominated”.<\/p>\n He referred to the so-called “Hamdi Triangle”: “Like the former Sudanese regimes, they over-prioritised Khartoum and surroundings, believing that support from the area within the Dongola-Kordofan-Sennar triangle is essential for their survival.”<\/p>\n In 2006, Abdelrahim Hamdi, a former minister of finance, presented a highly controversial proposal to the NCP leadership, which became known as the dialectics of the Hamdi Triangle. As the possibility of secession of southern Sudan was officially acknowledged in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the south Sudanese rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), Hamdi proposed to focus on an Arab-Islamic constituency of the “Riverine North”. In this way, a peaceful secession of the southern Sudanese region would be the result of the Arab-Islamic North’s own choice to secede from the rest of the country.<\/p>\n File photo: Reference map of Sudan (OCHA)<\/em><\/p>\n