ABSTRACT
The recovery of the Sudan after Nimeiri depends on the resolution of the civil war being fought mainly in the south. Without an end to the war there can be no political stability and no major improvement in the nation's economy. This fact was, perhaps, overlooked during the preoccupation with electoral arithmetic in Khartoum before 1989; a situation somewhat reminiscent of the 1960s when the electoral politics of the national capital proved irrelevant to a resolution of the first civil war. With a re-emergence of some of the old national parties after the fall of Nimeiri there was a return to an archaic political analysis of what is still called the 'Southern Problem' by some foreign observers as well as party leaders in the Sudan itself.
