Remembering Sudan’s Bright Star, Dentist Awad Dakkam
05 December, 2021
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - It is now a quarter century since the Sudanese early morning one day received the sad news of the departure of social star, the skilled dentist, Dr. Awad Dakkam.
Dr. Awad Dakkam was born in 1940 in the Halfayat Almilook suburb of Khartoum North.
His distinct character turned him into a social figure, accepted by all the sectors of the Sudanese society. His high sense of humor, the jokes he cracked here and there and his talent for creating sarcastic situations earned him the ability to create happiness and laughter wherever he went, to the degree that some chose to describe him as “a joke walking on two feet.”
By the result, his jokes and sarcasm found their way to the different corners of the country.
His brother Ahmed remembers, in a speech to a local newspaper, that Dr. Awad was so much loved by the different sectors of the society that in the area near to his private clinic in Khartoum North he befriended some homeless street kids.
One day some new homeless street kids came to the area from Omdurman.
Unknowingly they opened his car and took his personal bag. That same night and when they opened the bag to see what they have got, they found his photos and papers to shout out: “These things belong to Dr. Awad Dakkam.”
They quickly closed the bag and in the morning the next day they apologetically returned the bag to him.
Dr. Awad Dakkam is seen as one of the fathers of dental medicine in Sudan.
He had received his medical tuition in the then Republic of Yugoslavia, obtaining a BSC and a post graduate certificate in dental medicine from that country.
He was a crafty doctor, loved by both his patients and students.
He was attributed to have founded many government dental centers and hospitals around the Sudan.
For long years he had assumed the position of the country’s senior dentist, reaching the position of director of the Sudan’s Central Dental Hospital in which he trained hundreds of dentists.
As a patriot he is remembered to have refused to work for any country other than his home country Sudan, although he had, in the first place, paid for his medical studies on his own.
He was reported to have received a lucrative offer to launch a dental hospital in a rich Gulf country. Turning down the offer, he said: “I obtained my medical certificate to serve my country and its people, not any other country.”
Here the Gulf official who sought to contract him was so moved that he dropped the idea altogether and back home sent Dr. Awad Dakkam 26 sophisticated dental medication chairs for the country’s hospitals.
Upon receiving the gift, he distributed it to the dental clinics around the country, deliberately skipping the Khartoum dental hospitals, saying the least developed regions’ hospitals deserve the chairs the most.
The late Awad Dakkam was a charitable person, though he always preferred his assistance to the poor to stay in secret.
Here, his family remembers that after his death a certain woman stayed for seven days with them to attend his days of mourning and after.
And when she was asked about her relation with him, she said one day she came across him in the Khartoum market and asked him to help her with some money. He immediately toured the market with her and bought her all the vegetables and foods she needed, the same quantities as he bought for his own home.
She said she then asked him to give her some money for transport back to her home. “I will take you in my car,” he said and he did. The surprise was that he used to visit her on the first day each month to give her all the month’s household expenses.
It was officially known that Dr. Awad Dakkam had died of a stroke while attending a conference in Cairo in 1997. He was found dead in his hotel room.
But several writings point to a possible assassination committed by the Bashir regime.
The writers of these articles claim the regime had wanted to erase evidence that he had information surrounding the assassination attempt on the then Egyptian President Mohammad Husni Mubarak in Addis Ababa.
In October 2019, Judge Mohammad Alhassan Mohammad Osman filed a message to the then Attorney General Taj Alsir Alhibir urging him to open a legal investigation in the assassination attempt in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1995 against President Mubarak, the first accused in which is Sudan’s former Vice President Ali Osman Mohammad Taha, who is claimed to have committed 20 crimes to conceal evidences related to the Addis Ababa crime, including the killing of some of the terrorists who carried out the armed attack against the Egyptian president or were on the scene when the crime was committed.
Dr. Awad Dakkam was not party to the crime. But he was on the scene by mere chance. He was wandering in the major roundabout in Dolly Street in Addis Ababa where the assassination attempt took place. He was enjoying his time taking photos. As he was doing so, the assassination attempt took place and he was arrested by the Ethiopian security along with several other persons who happened to be around at the time.
He was kept in the Ethiopian security jails for several weeks and was then released after the Ethiopian Embassy in Khartoum certified that he was not part of the Bashir regime.
Back in Khartoum, he started to crack jokes about the incident as an eye witness.
Sometime later, Ali Osman Mohammad Taha (the vice president and the first accused in the attempted assassination) heard about his joking and allegedly ordered him to be liquidated in silence.
If real investigation is conducted on this matter and proved the allegation, the criminal regime would have added another crime to its record of harms to the Sudanese society and its beloved symbols.
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YH/AS
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