Famine in Sudan | “I can’t go on like this”

(Khartoum) Six months ago, Hassan Omar was selling the equivalent of 1,500 Canadian dollars worth of cans, cigarettes and other packets of washing powder every day in his grocery store in Khartoum. Today, his stalls are dusty and his income has halved.

“People can no longer buy what they need,” the 43-year-old Sudanese laments to AFP.

“Purchasing power has drastically declined over the past six months,” said the man who saw his sales drop from 500,000 to 200,000 Sudanese pounds.

With her salary as a civil servant equivalent to 500 Canadian dollars, Souad Béchir, mother of four children, has also noticed this drop in purchasing power.

“My salary is too low and the expenses too high” so “I try to find less expensive alternatives to replace the food that I can no longer buy”, explains to AFP this forties.

In Sudan, long one of the poorest countries in the world, the specter of famine now hangs over the whole country, where a third of the 45 million inhabitants already suffer from hunger.

“Full recession”

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s coup d’état on October 25, 2021 only aggravated the crisis: because of this putsch, the international community stopped giving the two billion dollars it paid every year in the country where in 2020 already, 65% of the inhabitants lived below the poverty line.

In one day, the state lost 40% of its budget, already affected by corruption, years of economic sanctions and the independence in 2011 of South Sudan, which took with it almost all the country’s oil.

So much so that the coup regime has still not given any figures on its 2023 budget.

Faced with this slump, Al-Nour Adam has decided to reduce the variety of vegetables he offers on his stall in the suburbs of Khartoum.

“Many of my goods rotted on the spot, because nobody bought them”, tells AFP this trader who has seen his income drop for nine months.

“I can’t go on like this, I’ll have to find another job,” he said.

Official statistics, however, could lead to optimism: inflation in December was only 87%, against 318% a year earlier.

But, explains Abdallah al-Ramady, an economist at Al-Nilein University in Khartoum, “if inflation is falling, it is because economic activity has been at a standstill for months”.

“There is no demand, so the rise in prices has stopped”, we are in “full recession”, says the researcher.

Mr. Omar, the Khartoum trader, confirms that he has not raised his prices for several months.

Universities, passports, tolls…

One thing, however, has increased: university fees.

In recent weeks, hundreds of students have demonstrated to denounce this increase.

This year, “I am being asked for 550,000 pounds (about 1,300 CAD dollars, editor’s note) and my family cannot pay”, tells AFP Mohammed Hussein, in the first year of engineering faculty. Last year, the same course cost more than ten times less.

Opposite, the teachers denounce their too low salaries and are now on an indefinite strike.

Taxes have also increased, whether to obtain a passport or simply to take a road.

“Toll fees have increased fivefold since last year,” Tijani Omar, a road haulier, told AFP.

“The cost of transport will rise and eventually all prices,” he warns.

To get their heads above water, some still want to believe that an agreement between civilians and the military can put the country back on the path to prosperity.

Abdelhalim Hafez, an employee of the private sector and the only employee in his family of six, hopes that the discussions in progress will lead quickly.

That way, he says, international aid will resume. And with it the assistance programs for the poorest from which he benefited until the putsch.

But according to experts, more than a year after the putsch the country is still far from an agreement, so deep is the gap between civilians and soldiers.