On Tuesday, Omar al Bashir touched down in the southern Sudanese city of Juba for what will almost certainly be his last visit there as head of state. Tomorrow, a long-awaited referendum on the future of the south will be held; all indications suggest that the vote will be strongly in favour of secession.
Even President al Bashir seems to have accepted this. "Imposing unity by force doesn't work," he told residents of Juba. "We want unity between the north and the south, but this doesn't mean opposing the desire of the southern citizen."
As he spoke, the president was watched closely by his vice president, a well-built man in a big black cowboy hat. If and when the south secedes, it will be Salva Kiir who steps out of Mr al Bashir's shadow as the first leader of an independent southern Sudan.
For Mr Kiir to lead Africa's newest country - with an as yet undecided name - will be the end of a long road for him and the region. Mr Kiir is the man who was not meant to lead.
In the spring of 2005, southern Sudanese were more optimistic than they had been for decades. A brutal civil war, one that lasted 22 yeas, had finally been brought to an end and a peace agreement signed with the north. The man who led the Sudan People's Liberation Movement fighters in the south, John Garang, was now installed as vice president of Sudan and the region had some measure of autonomy.
Garang had agreed a complex peace deal with the Khartoum government, under the terms of which the south would be exempted from Islamic law. The south was also granted six years of self-rule, followed by a referendum on separating.
In the summer of that year, Garang was returning from a meeting with the Ugandan president when his military helicopter crashed in bad weather, killing him instantly. After his death, Khartoum erupted in rioting by southerners convinced that Garang had been assassinated, and for a while it looked as if the fragile peace might tip back into civil war.
But the Sudanese president, Mr al Bashir, declared publicly that peace would hold and Mr Kiir was able to calm southerners. As Garang's deputy, Mr Kiir was the man to replace him, both as head of the SPLM and as president of southern Sudan.
Mr Kiir, a lifelong soldier barely known among the public, now had to take on the task of completing politically what he had started militarily four decades before.
The origins of a movement for southern secession in Sudan go back to the 1950s and the end of the British presence in the region. Southerners have long considered themselves culturally African, as distinct from the Arabs and Arabised north, and campaigned for independence in their political affairs. Mr Kiir is part of the Dinka clan, the largest ethnic group in the south, although he speaks English and Arabic, the main languages of the north.
After Sudan declared its independence in 1956, the secessionist movement took up arms against the government in Khartoum. Among those who joined the rebellion in the 1960s was a young Mr Kiir. But the rebellion - which lasted until 1972, when peace terms were finally brokered - took a devastating toll on an already poor south: hundreds of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced.
The 1972 agreement that ended the rebellion had at the heart of it the recognition of southern Sudan as an autonomous region. The agreement lasted for a decade until tensions - the nature of which are still disputed and discussed today - split the south from the government in the north. Mr Kiir became a founding member of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. He would spend the next two decades fighting the north's government.
Mr Kiir was said to be popular among the rebels he commanded and was responsible for military successes. He was very much an army man, in the shadow of the charismatic SPLM leader Garang. Garang, a former colonel in the Sudanese military who held a PhD, was by some accounts more of a political leader leading a rebellion. But the SPLM was fighting an insurgency and its tactics, like those of its targets in government, could be brutal.
Throughout the 1980s, the rebellion intensified under the command of Garang and Mr Kiir, so that by the early 1990s it became a civil war. This period was one of the most devastating for the country - what became known as the second Sudanese civil war was one of Africa's most destructive conflicts, bringing about the deaths of nearly 1.5 million people and displacing millions more.
When it finally ended in 2005, it seemed the continent's largest country was destined to split. Now in the political spotlight, these years proved testing for Mr Kiir, a man more used to military manoeuvres than political machinations. Taciturn where his predecessor was gregarious, practical where Garang was intellectual, he lacked the diplomatic experience to make the links necessary for a fledgling state.
The parliamentary elections of 2010 proved a difficult moment for the SPLM and Mr Kiir. These were to be Sudan's first elections for two decades and the SPLM needed to prove they had sufficient support among Sudanese. Yet Mr Kiir felt strongly that the elections would be rigged by Mr al Bashir's party and the SPLM did not want to contest the elections, lose and see their legitimacy to take the south into a referendum compromised.
For a while, Mr Kiir was seen as a possible contender to topple Mr al Bashir, particularly after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president. A trip to Washington the previous year to meet the then president, George W Bush, was seen as an attempt by the United States to raise his profile.
But as the election in April 2010 approached, he abandoned plans to stand against Mr al Bashir, accepting he could not hope to reach majority support and focused instead on being elected president of the south. He faced criticism though for fielding a different SPLM candidate against Mr al Bashir, before the later calling a boycott of the election in the north, citing security fears and voting irregularities. Yet his support in the south was undiminished and he was overwhelmingly elected president of the south.
Since then he has campaigned fervently for secession, arguing there is no future in Sudan remaining unified. "A referendum happens only once," he said. "People must come out en masse, otherwise it would mean people fought and died for nothing." He has said that to remain under the sway of north Sudan would be for southerners to be "second class citizens" in their own country.
Mr Kiir's hardest challenge is yet to come. As hard as the journey to independence has been, fulfilling statehood will be harder. Sudan is currently, by some considerable margin, Africa's largest country - southern Sudan will be huge, roughly the size of Nigeria, but with none of its infrastructure. There are barely 150km of paved roads in the whole region and, though rich in oil, the south lacks oil refineries. Investment from abroad may be swift, but managing it will be difficult.
Then there is the question of the economy, of jobs, of education, of health care, the daily business of government. Does Mr Kiir have the appetite for the detail of these discussions, for the deal-making that will follow? Even if he does, the task before the SPLM might prove too much. In September, the United Nations released what it titled "scary statistics" about the south. It makes grim reading: 4.3m people requiring food assistance in 2010; half the population without access to clean drinking water; 85 per cent of adults unable to read or write. These are the types of challenges that would defeat a functioning government. For the government in Juba, which currently spends 60 per cent of its income on the military, it may prove insurmountable.
The next time Mr Kiir receives Mr al Bashir in the presidential palace in Juba, he may well be a head of state. But the long road that has led him from fighting for independence to administering it is not over. The challenges of Mr Kiir and of the country he might lead are just beginning.
* The National
Born in 1951, a member of the majority Dinka tribe, in the southern state of Bahr-al-Ghazal
1968 At the age of 17 he joins the Anyanya, the southern separatist rebel army, during the first Sudanese civil war.
1972 The Addis Ababa Agreement ends the war, with Kiir as a low ranking officer who then joins the Sudanese army.
1983 John Garang is sent to put down a mutiny in the south but instead joins them, along with Kiir, beginning second civil war.
2004 After rising to become chief of staff of the SPLM, an attempt is made to remove him from the post, nearly splitting the movement.
2005 Garang is killed in a helicopter crash while returning from signing a peace treaty to end second civil war. Kiir is nominated national vice-president and southern president in his place.
2010 Relected with 93 per cent of the vote in the Sudanese elections after deciding not to stand against President Bashir.
Salva Kiir is the man aspiring to be the world's newest leader
Salva Kiir could soon be the president of southern Sudan, a role for which he has long been fighting, first as a soldier and rebel leader, then as Omar al Bashir's second in command.
Most popular today
