Ismail Al-Azhari - Prime Minister

Prime Minister

In 1954 al-Azhari became the Sudan's first prime minister. His government faced three major problems. The first was the critical constitutional question of the Sudan's relationship with Egypt. It soon became clear that the Sudanese people did not want to be tied closely to Egypt, and in his greatest act of statesmanship al-Azhari dramatically reversed the position which he had long advocated and, with the support of the principal political leaders, declared the Sudan independent on January 1, 1956.

Then al-Azhari was faced with the second problem, the task of organizing a permanent government. His principal opponent, the Umma Party, wanted a strong presidential system. Al-Azhari advocated a British parliamentary form of government, but he never resolved the issue during his tenure and the problem remained into the 1970s.

The third problem which confronted al-Azhari's government was the uniting of the black, non-Muslim Southern Sudanese with peoples and traditions very different if not opposed to the Arab, Muslim north. Neither by his background nor by his political convictions was al-Azhari sympathetic to the aspirations of the Southern Sudanese, and he sought to control the Southern Sudan by a combination of military and police repression on the one hand and negotiations and discussion on the other. The failure of the policy became apparent in 1955, when a mutiny in the Equatorial Corps precipitated disturbances throughout many of the districts in the south. Thereafter, relations between the Northern and the Southern Sudan remained the principal problem facing successive Sudanese governments. Their failure to meet Southern aspirations undermined their authority, just as it had drained al-Azhari's political strength.

These and other problems began to weaken al-Azhari's coalition. His reversal on unity with Egypt undermined the political strength of the NUP by depriving it of its principal ideology. The mutiny in the south damaged al-Azhari's prestige. More importantly, the fragile alliance between the Khatmiyya sect and the NUP began to disintegrate, leaving the prime minister without the popular support he needed to rule effectively. As a result, he reformed his coalition into a "government of all talents" in February 1956, but then his former Khatmiyya supporters deserted to form the People's Democratic Party in June. In July he lost a vote of confidence in Parliament and resigned.