WIREDGOV

As Sudan’s coup-regime tries to maintain its authority amid mounting economic pressure and mass protests, is this just a repeat of previous cycles of instability, a prelude to ‘Bashirism 2.0’, or an opportunity for genuine change?

In late October 2021, Sudan’s Transitional Government – a tentative bid towards democratisation after Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship – was overthrown by the military, marking the sixth ‘successful’ coup since independence. Civilian institutions were dismantled and cabinet members, including Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, arrested. In their place, a cartel of security services established a new Sovereign Council, led by Abdel al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and Mohamed ‘Hemmeti’ Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Framed as a ‘corrective measure to the transition’, the coup appears to be an atavistic rehash of the Bashir regime: a counter-revolution playing out with predictable linearity. Under a thin whitewash, the old mechanics of authoritarianism seem unchanged, a testament perhaps to the resilience of Sudan’s ‘Deep State’.

However, looks can be deceiving. Sudanese protesters – the same activists that forced the downfall of Bashir in 2019 – remain defiant, offering disjointed but effective resistance to Khartoum’s kingpins. At the same time, internal rifts – whether structural or personal – and external pressures are straining the government’s capabilities, suggesting the conventions and configurations that previously defined Sudanese kleptocracy may now be self-defeating. Whether these dynamics can coalesce and drive progressive change is unclear and depends on the response of local and international stakeholders. But they raise real questions over the sustainability of coup-governance and the need for systemic, comprehensive change.

Motion Without Movement?

The current model of Sudanese authoritarianism stems back, at least in part, to the secession of South Sudan in 2011, which fundamentally reshaped the logic of Bashir’s dictatorship. Previously benefiting from a glut of oil revenues, the president exploited a ‘rentier crony-capitalist system’ to buy elite loyalty and (some) public apathy, stoking a ‘boom in construction and consumer commodities’ across Khartoum and its surrounds – the so-called ‘Hamdi Triangle’ – while monetising wider governance at the expense of efficiency and function.

As Alex de Waal argues, the loss of Juba, and by extension Sudan’s oil fields, made these arrangements untenable, forcing diversification in the political economy and a dispersal of political power. Consequently, Bashir’s ‘centralised authoritarian kleptocracy’, fronted by the National Congress Party (NCP), lapsed into something closer to a ‘collusive oligopoly’, with various security organs and provincial strongmen from the Native Administration assuming control over new sources of political finance, namely gold mining, agriculture, and ‘state mercenarism’. Amid this fragmentation, the President’s leverage steadily diminished, leaving him as the least unfavourable option between competing powerbrokers. When protests over Sudan’s economic crisis in 2018/19 shifted into mass opposition against the regime, the calculus changed, exposing him as a liability and hastening his removal.

In this context, it is important to understand his fall not just as an outcome of popular revolution but also firewalling by lieutenants who had a stake in maintaining the wider systems Bashir himself helped cultivate. With their subsequent involvement in setting the terms of the transition and participation in its delivery, elites such as al-Burhan and Hemmeti were therefore able to keep the structure, pathology, and disposition of the country’s political economy largely intact: preserving a ‘colourfully corrupt transactional politics’ branded by some as ‘Bashirism without Bashir’.

Take, for instance, the SAF’s commercial networks, which actually appeared to grow in the aftermath of Bashir’s ousting, supplemented with assets pilfered from the former president’s family and rump agencies like the National Intelligence and Security Service (now the General Intelligence Service). No longer sharing their income with NCP bosses, Defence Industries Systems (formerly the Military Industrial Corporation) and other army holding companies have gradually assumed ownership of ‘hundreds of firms’ spanning sectors from oil, weapons and water through to pharmaceuticals, textiles and trucking. Reports suggest the SAF controlled up to 60% of the Sudanese wheat market alone in 2020, ensuring senior officers benefitted from long-running state subsidies. Hemmeti’s RSF reaped similar dividends, expanding stakes in gold mining and mineral exports and profiting from a matrix of shell and subsidiary businesses in agriculture, real estate and construction. Collectively labelled a ‘Deep State’, both groups have only become more prolific in reach and influence, consolidating ‘vertically integrated monopolies’ – both public and private – that continue to dominate the domestic economy.

Against this backdrop, civilian regulators never really had ‘control over these firms [or] access to their books’ during the transition. Although Hamdok pushed for greater transparency during his premiership, efforts to instigate military divestment, or simply catalogue state-owned enterprises, floundered. As an example, a milestone proposal was announced in March 2021 to transfer the civil arm of Defence Industries Systems over to the Ministry of Finance (MoF), but little concrete action seems to have taken place prior to the coup, in part because administrators had no sway over the Ministries of Defence and Interior. Whether from a lack of capacity or inclination, MoF authorities even struggled to extend their monitoring of Sudapet and Sudamin, corporate entities tied to comparatively benign technical institutions like the Ministry of Energy and Mining, reflecting a broader pattern of poor public financial management that crosscut the Sudanese government.

Calls for ‘national salvation’ and ‘strong leadership’ were exploited by the Sudanese Armed Forces as the pretext for its power-grab, drawing on the familiar script of past coups

Official budgetary lines for the RSF and SAF (roughly one third of public revenues) were similarly kept secret and failed to account for covert or illicit funding streams. While Sudan’s Auditor General and National Audit Chamber were ostensibly empowered to examine such expenditure, they were rarely able to impose penalties. Nor, crucially, was the transitional government able to map the scope of the defence sector as a whole, which remained concealed behind a series of informal linkages between political elites and local militia groups – a legacy of past policies dubbed ‘counterinsurgency on the cheap’.

Of course, there was some progress. In contrast to previous regulatory bodies, the ‘Elimination, Empowerment, Anti-Corruption and Funds Recovery Committee’ (EAFRC) and its various state-level affiliates did produce results, recovering between $1.06 billion and $3.5 billion in stolen assets. But its remit and activities were selective, initially prioritising former NCP officials and Bashir’s family over graft within the Sudanese defence establishment or its extra-legal offshoots. The inclusion of military stakeholders in Committee deliberations also risked insulating SAF conglomerates and financial dealings from ‘external’ investigation, compelling Hamdok to launch the exclusively civilian ‘Sudan Holding Company to Receive and Manage Recovered Assets’ to reinforce the process. Tellingly, the Committee’s belated re-focusing on the security services coincided with the coup’s preparation and build-up, demonstrating both the real threat the EAFRC posed to established interests and the transition’s chronic vulnerability when it came to pushing substantive reform.

The inherent limitations spelt out in the Draft Constitutional Declaration (2019/20) – the legal basis for Sudan’s transition – and the preservation of securocrats’ control therefore left Hamdok’s efforts looking superficial and short-lived. Many policies were reversed following the coup, with the arrest of civilian politicians and EAFRC personnel and the nullification of key decisions. For instance, a Khartoum court overrode the termination of over 100 staff from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; several NCP leaders were acquitted of corruption charges; Bashir-appointed judges were reinstated; and the Central Bank unfroze a suite of accounts connected to high-level functionaries and members of the Islamic Dawa Organisation. Additionally, in September Sudan’s Humanitarian Aid Commission re-registered 23 outfits banned under the EAFRC, including the Maarif Organisation for Peace and Development, chaired by Bashir’s brother, and the Sanad Charitable Organisation, run by his wife. Regressive trends are similarly evident in legislation, such as the reauthorisation of detention by General Intelligence Service agents, and the launch of a new Community Police Unit, a cursory rebrand of the Community Service Unit responsible for enforcing Sudan’s erstwhile Public Order laws.

Consequently, there seems to be little diminution in the power of the Sudanese ‘Deep State’. Despite Hamdok’s experimental technocracy, the sinews of Bashirism are still there, leading some to cast the experience more as a ‘decorative coup’ than an actual ‘transition’, one that eventually dropped any pretence of reform on 25 October 2021.

‘Something’s Got to Give…’

Beneath this apparent resilience, there are nevertheless external and internal stresses that not only reveal the weaknesses of the coup-regime but also reflect fundamental tensions with the logic of kleptocracy it represents.

Most obviously, the country is still beset by a deep economic malaise, with no panacea readily available. There is an irony here as calls for ‘national salvation’ and ‘strong leadership’ were exploited by the SAF as the pretext for its power-grab, drawing on the familiar script of past Sudanese coups. Upping the pressure on Hamdok, pro-military demonstrations were manufactured in September 2021, with civilians bussed into the capital chanting ‘the army will bring us bread’. In the same month, analysts suggest that a blockade of Port Sudan by the Beja Council – an ethno-centric political group – may have been deliberately strung out, with a bargain between al-Burhan and ‘local big men’ successfully restoring the flow of basic imports to Khartoum immediately after the army’s takeover – an exercise in ‘transactional provincial politicking’ to help showcase military efficacy. While the authenticity of these moves was not particularly convincing, the optics and slogans laid the groundwork for October’s putsch.

Yet, they have also exposed al-Burhan’s ensuing tenure as a failure on its own terms. Sudanese cities are still paralysed by protests; inflation remains rampant; and the reimposition of sanctions has smothered foreign investment. As a direct consequence of the coup, essential processes – the normalisation of financial relations, debt rescheduling, and participation in the World Bank’s ‘HIPC’ programme – were suspended, and desperately needed international assistance has been paused. As Hemmeti himself conceded in March, the government does not even have the liquidity to fund its embassies. Cash infusions from the Gulf stave off total collapse, but they cannot ‘fix the fundamentals’ and lack the scale, breadth and sustainability to replace support from Western-backed financial institutions. Nor is input from alternative partners like Russia a realistic proposition: despite bilateral visits, military cooperation and Sudan’s backing for the self-ascribed People’s Republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, the Kremlin is preoccupied by its own economic concerns. This leaves al-Burhan reliant on unpopular austerity measures analogous to those of Bashir, exposing him to the same public anger and political vulnerabilities as the price of goods soars.

Even as mass demonstrations rallied around the broad aim of toppling Bashir back in 2019, there were discrepancies between the longer-term priorities voiced in Khartoum, and those further afield

A second issue is factionalism within the Deep State itself. Unlike Egypt, the Sudanese army does not have the capacity to govern alone, leaving it dependent on a cluster of parallel security services, most obviously the RSF. This has always been a tenuous coalition given the group’s genealogy and disparities in pay and equipment, with the increasing clout of rural militiamen chafing against the SAF’s conservative sensibilities and ethnic chauvinism. Hemmeti’s prominence – as a Darfurian – likewise distorts Sudan’s normative conventions and social geography. His leadership of the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement, for example, not only increased his own political heft, but also allowed former rebels access to national ministries in Khartoum, spaces usually reserved for the country’s riverine elite.

Amid a fragmented political and security arena – one no longer mediated by an astute manager like Bashir – RSF resources also pose a direct threat to al-Burhan’s influence and authority. The group has already offered salaries to teachers and police; pledged $1 billion to stabilise the Sudanese Central Bank; supplied welfare services, vaccines and medical support through purpose-built hospitals; and established a string of ‘proto-towns’ such as Zurrug in Darfur, replete with schools and clinics recycled from UN bases. Local units ‘dig wells, organise healthcare’, oversee harvests, invest in entrepreneurship and ‘[assume] social provision and insurance functions’. The RSF has even pursued ‘its own foreign policy’, receiving lucrative kickbacks for counterinsurgency operations in Yemen. In short, Hemmeti’s paramilitary is starting to resemble a state in itself.

This has only become more pronounced in the context of international grain shortages. Much of the country’s political economy is based on ‘turning rural surpluses into foreign exchange that pays for the basic food and energy needs of urban [customers]’ – inequities requiring the ‘hyper-exploitation’ of Sudan’s peripheries. Over time, such processes have been outsourced to local militias, expediting a ‘militarisation of pastoral livelihoods’ and violent cycles of expropriation. Within this context, Edward Thomas and Magdi el Gizouli describe how the RSF leverages superior military organisation and ‘logistical capabilities’ to swallow up competitors ‘en toto’, extending its control over vast chunks of the agricultural and resource base that condit