Nairobi — The Khartoum regime is the political gift that keeps on giving to its enemies. Having got the US off its back for its alleged support of international terrorism, and with a peace deal to end the nearly 30-year southern rebellion led by the Sudan People's Liberation Army nearly in the bag, one would have thought Khartoum has finally mastered the art of political survival. But no.

There is the matter of the Sudan Liberation Army rebellion in the western region of Darfur. Nothing near the scale of the challenge that the SPLA was, but the Sudan government responded to it with disproportionate ferocity. It not only throw the army ateverything that moves in Darfur, it also released the leader of the Janjaweed militia from jail, and rebuilt and armed it, then unleashed it to cleanse the non-Arab populations from the region.

As we entered Christmas, generous estimates put the number of civilians at nearly 100,000, and those displaced and dying daily like flies in the camps for internally displaced persons at about 1.5 million.

After a combination of African Union, United Nations and also sorts of international pressure, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan last week seemed to despair. He declared that the too-much-carrot and too-little-stick approach with Khartoum over Darfur had failed, and it might be time to bring out only the clubs.

Actually, the failure to bring the crisis in Darfur to resolution expeditiously could prove a blessing in disguise - it opens the door to a more long-term solution.

Before Darfur, with the Nairobi-brokered peace process between Khartoum and SPLA looking promising, the two-state solution - with the south as in independent nation - seemed to lose steam. Many people feared that creating new nations on what might look like a religious basis, would have a catastrophic knock-on effect on a fragile and fractured Africa.

However, most of the victims of the Khartoum-Janjaweed alliance are Muslims. Their persecution has for the first time created something close to a majority of Sudanese who face annihilation, instead of protection, from Khartoum. And the old divide, beloved by the Western media, of "Christian and animist" southerners and "Arab and Muslim" northerners has been shaken up.

Today, the prospect of a much-enlarged independent New Sudan state looks much more attractive. The recent announcement of an East African political federation by 2013 is a great opportunity to help the New Sudan project along. How? The bulk of the various southern Sudan leaders are more East African than Sudanese. Most of them studied and live in Kenya and Uganda. SPLA/SPLM leader Dr John Garang, went to university in Tanzania, and lives mostly in Kenya when he is not at his Sudanese base. Whole Sudanese communities have been "Ugandanised", and of course there are hundreds of thousands of them who live in East Africa as refugees.

Conditions in non-Arab regions of Sudan are medieval. They don't have schools, and don't use currency. The main form of commerce is still barter.

The East African Secretariat could open a section to recruit East Africans to help rebuild and set up new systems in the expanded New Sudan. East Africa could also open its schools to special exchange programmes to turn out thousands of mid-level New Sudan cadres to return home and start up a basic administration. The police colleges could help with the cops, and the Nairobi Defence College in Karen, Nairobi, with the officer corps. Infrastructure projects running into northern Uganda and Kenya could all have a southern Sudan element. And in 2013, the wider New Sudan could be admitted into the EAC.

But before we get there, pressure should be put on Khartoum through a few bold Africa countries publicly recognising New Sudan. After all, there are already a couple of cars with NS (New Sudan) number plates on Kenyan and Ugandan roads. We might as well go the whole hog.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is managing editor in charge of media convergence at the Nation Media Group.

E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke