Protests at bread price rise spark biggest threat to Sudan dictator

What is unfolding in the streets of Sudan’s capital Khartoum and other cities is almost reminiscent of the Arab Spring uprising several years ago when citizens in the north of Africa and the Middle East rose up there against decades of dictatorship that failed to address the plight of ordinary people.

On Tuesday in Sudan, the street protests culminated in a march by thousands of protesters to the gates of the presidential palace calling on Mr Bashir to leave office.

At least 19 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in clashes that erupted in cities, including Khartoum, on December 19, after a government decision to increase the price of bread. But most observers say this is now about much more than that.

President Bashir is no stranger to political crises of course. Ever since he came to power in a coup in 1989, the 74-year-old has presided over a sanction-hit Sudan for much of the past 20 years, which slumped the country into the status of a near-pariah state.

This was the nation after all that served as a safe haven for Osama bin Laden, who lived there for five years before being expelled in 1996. In 2009 too President Bashir became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), for atrocities committed in Darfur, where the UN says up to 300,000 people may have died and millions been displaced since 2003, ensuring sanctions remained in place long after the country turned its back on extremists.

Hardly surprising then that when Washington revoked the most punitive of sanctions in 2017, Sudanese citizens thought that at long last they might now be shaking off the yoke of economic isolation.

But as so often is the case under authoritarian regimes it was not to be. There was no financial windfall or more political freedom. A toxic mix of state profligacy, corruption, and lack of foreign investment or aid ensured that only President Bashir and his inner circle became the real beneficiaries. Which brings us to the current crisis.

The prevailing economic mismanagement has meant that inflation has skyrocketed, prices have more than doubled and the value of the Sudanese pound has plunged. According to government data, only a few months ago, inflation reached a staggering annual rate of 70 per cent meaning that many ordinary Sudanese can no longer spend money on meat or fuul, a staple food made of cooked fava beans.

Indeed it’s estimated that some people now spend 40 per cent of their income on bread alone. Also worth remembering is that long before the current crisis, Sudan lost something like 75 per cent of its lucrative oil revenues when the South, now a country in its own right, seceded in 2011

Until the secession, oil revenues consisted of more than half of Sudan’s revenues, and about 90 per cent of exports, a colossal part of the country’s income.

African watchers now worry that instability in Sudan will impact on neighbouring South Sudan and could scupper a fragile peace deal signed by President Salva Kiir and rival Riek Machar in September.

But for the moment all eyes are on Khartoum where earlier this week twenty-two Sudanese opposition political parties and groups demanded that Mr Bashir transfer power to a “sovereign council” and a transitional government that would set a “suitable” date for democratic elections.

It’s a measure of how things have changed and the crisis Mr Bashir faces, that these opposition groupings calling themselves the National Front for Change, include some Islamist factions that were once allied with the president.

“This government does not have the ability to overcome the economic crisis because the economic crisis is basically a political crisis,” Mubarak Elfadel, chairman of the official opposition Umma Party, told reporters at a press conference in Khartoum.

Faced with opposition that at the very least seriously challenges the legitimacy of Mr Bashir’s government and could even bring it down, the president has resorted to familiar tried and tested methods of repression.

The arrest, interrogation and detention of opponents, real and imagined, in infamous “ghost houses,” where dissidents were tortured has always been a fact of life In President Bashir’s Sudan.

Eyewitnesses at the moment speak of the regime’s unleashing of its extensive security apparatus and paramilitaries. Some have claimed of seeing snipers stationed on buildings along protest routes in towns across Sudan, while young men in plain clothes known as “ghost squads,” patrol the streets in government issued pick-up trucks.

Human rights group Amnesty International has put the death toll of the protests at 37 while the official opposition, Umma Party says 45 have been killed, hundreds injured and thousands more arrested.

After two weeks of violent protests however President Bashir has sought to placate popular anger, and on Tuesday ordered an investigation into “recent events”. Many believe this is another tell-tale sign of a leader under pressure like never before.

“The regime is panicking,” Hafiz Ismail Mohamed, an activist with the nongovernmental human rights groups Justice Africa, was quoted as saying earlier this week. “I have never seen them panicking like this,” he added.

Protests had begun spontaneously and without apparent leaders, he said, but now, people were organising themselves into a movement.

As ever President Bashir will hope to ride out the crisis and has gone to considerable lengths to crush or play down the opposition he now faces.

“Our country is going through pressing economic conditions that have hurt a large segment of society,” he said in response. “We appreciate this suffering, feel its impact and we thank our people for their beautiful patience,” he said in a conciliatory speech a few days ago.

That “beautiful patience” has long been tested in this beleaguered country. For many ordinary Sudanese now though it might finally have run out.