Southern Sudan Referendum Commission Expects to Register Voters in October

The commission organizing Southern Sudan’s referendum on independence set for Jan. 9 plans to start registering voters next month, a spokesman for the body said.

The initial voters’ roll was due to be completed by the end of August, according to the referendum law passed by Sudan’s national assembly in December. The Southern Sudan Referendum Commission’s secretary-general, Mohamed Othman al-Nojomi, assumed his duties yesterday, spokesman Tarek Othman al-Taher said today.

“We expect the registration to be in October, but it’s too early to set a date for it,” al-Taher, secretary of the commission, said by phone from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. The body may announce the referendum’s schedule this month, he said.

The independence vote is a key component of a 2005 peace agreement that ended two decades of civil war between Sudan’s Muslim north and the south, where Christianity and traditional beliefs dominate. About 2 million people died in the conflict, and more than 4 million were displaced.

Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the former rebel group that now governs Southern Sudan, haven’t agreed on post-referendum arrangements such as responsibility on foreign debt and how to share the nation’s oil wealth.

Oil fields in Southern Sudan account for most of the nation’s crude output, which, at 490,000 barrels a day, is the third-biggest in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Sudan’s northern and southern regions now split the proceeds from oil pumped in the south. The crude is exported through a pipeline that runs north through Sudan to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. No agreement has been reached between the two sides on pipeline-usage fees following the referendum.

To contact the reporter on this story: Maram Mazen in Khartoum via the Cairo newsroom at mmazen@bloomberg.net.

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