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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies

11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands


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The role of native administration in managing the post-war transition in Sudan: insights from Blue Nile State

Panel 16. New ways of managing public administrations in Africa ?
Paper ID735
Author(s) Elnaiem, Buthaina Ahmed
Paper No paper submitted
AbstractThe Native Administration is an important political factor in the Blue Nile State. It plays a key role in routine administration of the remote rural areas. Still this self-help approach of administration at the village level seems to be the most sustainable one. The logic of this native administration was that, much routine administration could be done through local authorities, using customary structures and law, and in so far as these could be co-opted by government. Historically much of this had been implicit in administration of the rural areas of Sudan from the start of the colonial British regime; everywhere 'legitimate' chiefs had been sought out, especially in the North, which was traditionally characterized by this type of administration as having usurped the authority of traditional rulers. Much of the administrative activity throughout the Sudan in the 1920s and early 1930s was spent in regularizing what had gone on before by providing the legal and administrative framework for a devolution which was still to be closely supervised by British officials. However during the former government the previous two decades had been spent in subordinating the very indigenous rulers in rural Sudan, which the new theory of native administration now required to be propped up. Currently, after the implementation of the CPA in the Blue Nile and the construction of the new government the public administration, government institutions and capacities are still nascent throughout the Blue Nile and the political and administrative infrastructure of the new governments remain weak. This paper is exploring the recent developments in Blue Nile after the CPA with regard to government, public administration and development situation. The paper is investigating the factors that could be part of the reasons of the slow process of building an effective administrative system in the Blue Nile State. The paper is trying to answer the following main questions: - What is the current situation of the public adminstration in rural Blue Nile - What could be the reasons and constraints behind the slow proccess of building an effective administrative system in the Blue Nile State? - Could the local institutions, such as, the native adminstration build a bridge and play a role in biulding an effective adminstrative system in rural areas of the Blue Nile. The methodology of this paper was designed to enable the collection of reliable information required to describe the status quo in the Blue Nile State. The data has been collected from both Primary (Quantitative and qualitative data and information) and Secondary sources. They were collected at the two following levels: Information from central bodies involved in states' development policies; State level: interview with key informants, Documents, reports, studies and information provided by different actors at the state level.