ثورة العيش

This briefing unpacks the connected political and economic crisis that reached a climax in early 2019 through the contrasting but connected worlds of Sudan’s bread and sorghum eaters. Its conclusion presents the limited options available to the as yet unelected technocratic government.

On 11 April 2019, leaders of the military, security and militia formations he relied upon to maintain his rule overthrew him in a palace coup after months of mass protests and civil unrest across the country. Witness to his abasement were thousands of people who amassed around the army headquarters in Khartoum to demand his ouster. Sudan’s season of revolt had claimed its highest prize.

President Bashir’s return to Khartoum after the drama of his ‘missed’ arrest in Johannesburg was to say the least anticlimactic. The microphone set up for him to address the ‘spontaneous’ crowd which gathered at the airport to greet him home did not work. Turned to mute by a mysteriously untimely intervention, the president shouted a few sentences from the roof of a white pick up and that was…

The media simply can’t get enough of him. The commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, famous as Himeidti, a motherly diminutive version of his first name, is as ubiquitous as Zain advertisements. Two major newspaper published interviews with the ‘hero’ of al-Nakhara in one day. The official Sudan TV and the government-associated al-Shurooq TV recycle reports about the…

For six years rebel forces in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states (the Two Areas) have been battling the Sudanese government. Round after round of negotiations mediated by the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa have failed to bring an end to what is a continuation of the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005) fought by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement against the Sudanese…

Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, a Sudanese veteran communist politician and feminist, passed away in London on 12 August. She is survived by her son Ahmed with the late al-Shafie Ahmed al-Sheikh, a communist trade union leader who met his death at the gallows at the orders of President Nimayri in the aftermath of the failed 19 July 1971 communist coup attempt. For Fatima the political was essentially…