Politics
Raw Macadamia Nut Exports: Kenya Executes an About-Turn
6 min read.The government has decided to lift the ban on exports of raw nuts but what the country’s macadamia nut sector sorely needs is policy support from the national and county governments.
The government has backtracked on a directive that was, ironically, issued by President William Ruto when he was Kenya’s agriculture minister. In 2009, Ruto banned the export of unprocessed macadamia nuts to allow local processors access to larger quantities of the raw material which in turn would create jobs in this labour-intensive sector.
In recent years, macadamia farming has gained traction in even non-traditional growing areas beyond Mt Kenya such as the Rift Valley and western regions. However, both the county and national governments have consistently failed to put in place all the measures necessary to support the macadamia sector and this has significantly affected farm gate prices today, leading to huge losses for farmers.
A number of factors have contributed to the poor farm gate prices, which the government wrongly assumes will improve once competition is introduced by bringing in more exporters of raw macadamia.
Following the export ban, both the national government and county governments in macadamia catchment areas failed to provide the policy support necessary to promote a sector where four years ago the farm gate price for a kilo of raw nuts was Ksh180 due to the increased number of processors. Fears have emerged in recent years that Kenya is losing its grip on the niche international market due to the low quality of the nuts produced, which makes the KSh180 per kilo price unsustainable.
At the time Kenya instituted the ban on exports of raw macadamia nuts in 2009, there were only three other macadamia nut-producing countries in the world—Australia, South Africa, and Hawaii in the United States, with Kenya supplying about 20 per cent of the total global demand.
Between 90 and 95 per cent of Kenya’s macadamia is produced for export. Key export destinations for Kenyan macadamia are the US, the European Union, Japan, China, Hong Kong and Canada. In 2020, the demand for Kenya’s macadamia globally declined by 40 per cent, a drop the processors attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
New entrants who now threaten Kenya’s global market include China, Guatemala, Malawi, Vietnam, Colombia, New Zealand, Mozambique, Brazil, Paraguay and Swaziland. In total, 15 countries in the world have joined the macadamia producing club in the last decade.
The Chinese government established the International Macadamia Research and Development Center in Lincang in 2018 and the country’s market potential for macadamia is now the largest on the planet, recording an 11-fold increase in macadamia consumption between 2012 and 2018.
In an earlier interview, the Chief Executive Officer of the Nut Processors Association of Kenya (NutPAK), Mr Charles Muigai, said that the biggest challenge to Kenya’s market competitiveness in the global arena is the low quality of nuts produced by Kenyan farmers due to the insufficient support the sector receives from the government and other actors.
A report by the Netherlands Centre for the Promotion of Imports from Developing Countries titled Value Chain Analysis for Macadamia Nuts from Kenya 2020 cited climate change, the impact of pests and diseases, poor agricultural practices, lack of access to inputs, use of unsuitable or old macadamia varieties and immature harvesting as Kenya’s main challenges.
At a critical point of transition following the ban, there was no functioning formal association of macadamia farmers. The Ministry of Agriculture did initiate the creation of the Macadamia Growers Association of Kenya in 2009, but it remains underfunded and without offices.
Unlike the tea and coffee sectors, the macadamia sector has evolved without any regulation or policy support from the government, the only major interventions being the 2009 ban and its anchoring in law in 2018.
The production of macadamia nuts in Kenya traces its history to 1944 when a European settler named Bob Harries introduced the crop from Australia in his estate near Thika town for ornamental and household consumption purposes.
The government would years later facilitate the creation of a joint venture between Japanese investors led by Yoshiyuki Sato and a Kenyan, Pius Ngugi, to set up the Kenya Nut Company (KNC), which to this day still runs the factory in Thika.
Initially, the company built a modern processing plant and established its own macadamia plantations on about 400ha and also set up a nursery for the propagation of adapted and grafted seedlings to supply out-growers.
The production of macadamia nuts in Kenya traces its history to 1944 when a European settler named Bob Harries introduced the crop from Australia.
By 1975, the company was processing nuts from its own estate as well as from out-growers. It enjoyed a monopoly purchase right for in-shell nuts, sourcing 90 per cent of the raw nuts from 140 smallholder coffee cooperative societies, as well as from another 47 buying centres.
Like the cashew nut sector, the macadamia sector was affected by the liberalisation of the economy. Being a private company, KNC could not be privatized, which shielded it from the decay that ensued in the cashew nut sector.
However, liberalisation accelerated domestic competition. In 1994, Equity Bank founder Peter Munga opened a macadamia processing factory called Farm Nut Co. in Maragua in then Murang’a District.
With the entry of Farm Nut, the role of middlemen became predominant, due to the logistics challenges faced by the company in sourcing nuts from farmers. Brokers would buy nuts directly from the farmers, offering better prices than the cooperatives had, and immediate payment. Consequently, this significantly reduced farmers’ costs of transporting nuts to collection centres and collecting payments from banks.
Moreover, reduced volumes from the cooperatives increased processors’ transactional costs. It became more convenient for them to deal with middlemen, and by the early 2000s, the role of the cooperatives in the macadamia supply chain had diminished.
A dramatic shift in the industry came in the early 2000s when China became a mass consumer of the nuts. The emergence of a growing middle class in China with an appetite for in-shell nuts, and the increasing number of container ships docking in Mombasa demanding cargo for the return journey, tempted Chinese traders to venture into the export of raw macadamia nuts from the country.
Local processors would buy nuts mainly from Kiambu, Murang’a, Kirinyaga, and Nyeri, where Kikuyu processors had established processing units and created networks with local communities that they hired for factory jobs. This helped to lock the Chinese out of these regions.
Estimates by the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service indicate that nearly 60 per cent of macadamia had been exported in-shell in 2008, implying that exporters had been able to purchase most of the crop from Embu and Meru. This posed a huge threat, bringing processors together to push the government to ban the export of raw nuts that was finally instituted on 16 June 2009.
A dramatic shift in the industry came in the early 2000s when China became a mass consumer of the nuts.
With the exit of the Chinese and the creation of processors’ and farmers’ associations, there was hope that the industry would get organised and receive the necessary support.
This did not happen. Both the farmers and processors would soon be left to their own devices, competing with each other to fight the Chinese who were still smuggling nuts out of Kenya. However, the competition and the need to create more volume saw processors increase production five-fold in the last decade, reaching close to 50,000 metric tonnes by 2020. They also grew in number from 5 to over 30, a move that saw farmers get an unprecedented Sh200 a kilo despite complaints that the quality did not justify the price.
In Meru and Embu the belief remained that things would be different were the Chinese buyers still available, and this may have prompted the recent lifting of the ban. The processors blamed the poor prices on brokers and the resultant high percentage of immature nuts. A narrative was also pushed that if farmers started selling the nuts to processors directly—rather than via brokers—good prices would return.
According to the report of the Centre for the Promotion of Imports from Developing countries, the main opportunity for yield improvement lies with supporting extension service providers, such as the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Organisation (KALRO) and the Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA), to increase farmers’ capacities and to multiply and disseminate high-yielding macadamia seedlings that are suited to the different macadamia growing regions of Kenya.
There are two main areas of intervention for quality improvement. The first involves supporting processors who wish to obtain loans to buy crops in advance, thereby addressing farmers’ need for quick cash. The second is the implementation of region-relevant harvesting moratoria.
Upstream traceability of Kenyan macadamia is severely challenged by the large number of smallholder farmers and independent buying agents. Small plantations typify Kenya’s production system as opposed to producers like China, South Africa and Australia, which have large plantations. Around 200,000 small farms in Kenya currently produce an estimated 42,500 tons of in-shell nuts.
Upstream traceability of Kenyan macadamia is severely challenged by the large number of smallholder farmers and independent buying agents.
Moreover, support should go to the creation of a registry of farmers, including data such as landholding size, age and number of macadamia trees and macadamia varieties and traders. This registry should be governed and accessed by members of the sector’s associations and by the AFA.
Communication and dialogue among macadamia stakeholders is lacking, with conflicting interests among actors often leading to rivalry.
To address this, sector associations should establish, adopt and enforce codes of conduct to regulate sector players. Dialogue and transparency should be the ruling principles of this code of conduct. Moreover, all actors should discuss a multi-stakeholder strategy to address the challenges facing the macadamia sector.
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Politics
Africa Before the Doctrine of Discovery
How are we to discuss and deal with colonization in Africa without using language that acknowledges that we were something before colonization?
The problem is that nothing—no word, phrase, or method of understanding history—can ever be vast enough to capture what Táíwò acknowledges is the very complex history of the African continent, and yet be specific enough for discourse on the subject. Indeed, no word, phrase or expression can fully contain all the nuances of an idea or subject; this is a general foible in language. What is a “chair” if we insist that the word must account for every piece of furniture, device, or technology that has ever been used to support or facilitate the act of sitting? The work-around for this problem is to interpret words—and use language—within relevant context. This necessarily limits the potential interpretative scope that words and phrases carry, and thus facilitates communication.
It is important to flag this limiting context of precolonial early on because it is the foundation that grounds Táíwò’s concerns.
Precolonial Africa is (not) vacuous
Táíwò argues that precolonial tells us nothing or, at best, very little about the history of the continent; he is concerned that it defines little and elides a lot. He argues that precolonial does not offer any understanding of what the precolonial period entailed, of the nuances that characterized that era. If this reasoning were followed to its logical conclusion, then all periodization techniques would be judged as vacuous.
The task of periodization is not to define what the societies were in a given period, but merely to categorize the past into blocks of time to facilitate our study of history. Periodization often follows events, incidents, and structures that fundamentally altered the way societies were organized over the course of history. I’ll offer an example: the use of “Before Christ (BC)” and “Anno Domini (AD)” is a common periodization device in history; it divides history into two: the world before and the world after the approximate date of birth of Jesus, the Christian Christ. These designations tell us nothing about what society within these two periods entailed—what they looked like, and how they were organized—all they do is help arrange history in a way that serves the study of social evolution through time.
To further emphasize what he argues is the vacuousness of precolonial, Táíwò invites us to consider what is obfuscated. He asks us to consider what precolonial Yorùbáland or precolonial Ìbàdàn might mean. However, what he does not ask us to consider is what precolonial Nigeria means, or why precolonial Yorùbáland is today geographically divided between anglophone Nigeria, and francophone Bénin Republic and Togo. These latter questions demonstrate the utility and necessity of emphasizing the colonial experience in our accounting of African history—it is the only honest way to tell the story of how African countries came to be. This experience should not, and really cannot, be ignored in favor of exploring other aspects of African history. To insist that African historians ignore the colonial experience if they are to truly appreciate their history is to impose an unflattering simplicity on them.
Táíwò is additionally concerned about the homogenizing effect that the term precolonial imposes on African history; he argues that it flattens the contours of society before European colonization. He insists that one phrase cannot sufficiently account for the complex histories and experiences of African societies before colonization. Here again, a misappreciation of the task of periodization shows up. The utility of the phrase is that it acknowledges that the continent was something, a different thing, before the colonial incident, but it does not claim that it was one thing.
Accordingly, a more accurate picture is to regard precolonial as a gate or a boundary. Step through the gates back in time and you enter the discourse on vast and varied African societies prior to colonization; step through the gate in the opposite direction and you enter the discourse on 19th-century European colonization of Africa and its continued impact on the structures and institutions of African states.
Precolonial Africa is (not) racist
Táíwò also argues that the use of precolonial to describe Africa before 19th-century colonization leans into racist ideas about Africa. This argument contains two ideas: the first is that precolonial Africa existed; the second is the racist idea that precolonial Africa was a land “outside of time” and not worthy of consideration in a conversation about world history. Táíwò conflates both ideas to reach the conclusion that to speak of a precolonial Africa at all is to buy into the racist idea of Africa’s history beginning from European colonization. He inexplicably binds himself to only two choices: either precolonial Africa exists as it does under the racist imagination, or it does not exist at all. In other words, he argues that, if racist scholars have said precolonial Africa was a primitive wasteland, then Africans must uphold this definition. A different approach, which other scholars have adopted, is to say, the Europeans got it wrong—precolonial Africa was not a primitive wasteland. This latter approach has the advantage of resisting the European narrativizing of African history, which is the goal Táíwò has in mind. Táíwò, however, fails to achieve it because he makes the European understanding of precolonial Africa the starting point of his exposition.
Another aspect to Táíwò’s claim that the phrase is racist is his concern that “the ubiquitous phrase is almost exclusive in its application to Africa: ‘precolonial Africa.’” He asks, “How often do we encounter this designation in discourses about other continents?” First, it is worth noting that precolonial is traditionally also applied to other countries that similarly experienced 19th-century European colonization, such as India, Canada, and Australia, amongst others. The point is taken, however, that there is a certain racist idea that underlies the way the phrase precolonial Africa is typically applied.
Might I suggest that the quarrel is with the wrong half of the phrase precolonial Africa. Perhaps what Táíwò is picking up on is the still-alive instinct to read Africa—including postcolonial Africa—as universally primitive and sub-developed. Thus, it is the assumptions about Africa that reflect racist ideas, and if this is the case, then the problem is not solved by capitulating to these racist ideas. The valid concern about the over-simplification of complex African societies as one (primitive) identity should not be exploited as an impetus to propose a similarly overbroad approach, which is what Táíwò’s suggests.
Precolonial is (not) plain wrong
The last theme of Táíwò’s attack on precolonial is that it is “plain wrong.” He argues: because colonial events occurred within and by African societies before the 19th-century European colonization, it is wrong to make the latest incident the focal point of our discussion around colonization in Africa.
This argument presumes that the only way to fully engage with the robust and complex precolonial history of African societies is to look away from the reality of the European colonization of the 19th century. This presupposes that African scholars are incapable of multitasking; of appropriately foregrounding the colonial event while acknowledging the many inter- and intra-community relations that took place prior. This argument imposes a simplicity on African scholars, researchers, historians, and readers quite akin to what he describes as the racist over-simplification of African history as just one thing.
Another prong in Táíwò’s argument is the concern that the term precolonial divides African history into three periods—precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. Indeed, precolonial suggests a periodization of Africa in relation to the colonial event, but this is not wrong or useless as Táíwò suggests. We cannot deny that the European colonization of the 19th century is at the center of the identity of almost all African countries today. “Nigeria” did not exist before European colonization. To speak of a precolonial Nigeria is a natural way to acknowledge the precolonial indigenous communities that were foisted together under one political and sovereign identity by the British. To do otherwise is to ignore the ways the shared experience of colonization across and among these different communities necessarily puts these communities and their histories in conversation with one another.
Furthermore, there is an important consideration that Táíwò appears to be overlooking: the existence of periodization that centers the colonial event does not preclude other methods of periodization. The discourse around African history is broad enough to accommodate precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial; ancient, medieval, and modern; or whatever other schema may serve the specific study in question. What remains crucial however is that African history must duly acknowledge the colonial event as a significant marker that ushered in a new era for the continent.
Finally, assuming we take it as fact that precolonial obfuscates and that there are aspects of African history that are elided under the blanket of precolonial Africa, is that enough to dispense with the precolonial designation? If all of Táíwò’s charges against the phrase were true, is it not also true that the phrase exposes a very important shared history among African communities that can only be captured by this phrase? To be sure, the thousands-years-old civilizations and evolutions matter a great deal, but they do not and, in fact, need not matter at the expense of the more recent European colonial experience, which in many ways irreversibly impacted the ways our societies are organized.
European colonization completely reorganized the structure of African states, taking them from empires, kingdom, and autochthonous communities to sovereign states, countries that closely resemble their colonial forebears in laws, institutions, language, and culture. How then can we say that this incident is not epoch-defining enough as to form the basis of periodization? The fact that an aspect of history leaves a sour taste in does not make it one that we should ignore. Indeed, it is this exact quality that makes it impossible to ignore; that makes it momentous. What happens if we ignore the incident of colonial intervention in our historical narrativizing and periodization? How then do we account for the ongoing effects of colonization, a reality that exists only because of the colonizing incident?
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.
Politics
Black Africa: How North of the Sahara Was Whitewashed
As xenophobic attacks and anti-black rhetoric ramp up in North Africa, it is useful to highlight (or remember) the fluid, intertwined histories of the Saharan region.
The recurring reports of violence, racism, and xenophobia against undocumented “sub-Saharan” African migrants in Libya and in Tunisia are very concerning. Prompt scrutiny into a complex and often dangerous public discourse about cultural identity, colonialism, and racism in the north of the continent is needed.
Though this discourse and its attendant violence have a longer history, recently Tunisia’s President Kais Saied said such populations (in reference to West and Central African undocumented migrants) are turning Tunisia into “a purely African country with no affiliations to the Arab and Islamic nations”—as if being African is contradictory to being Arab or Muslim. His words intentionally overlook the fact that large numbers of people on the continent identify as Arab and African, African and Muslim, or Arab, African, and Muslim. The construction of blackness as foreign to northern Africa (as imported with slavery and associated with stigma) has only reinforced a false notion of “North Africa” and “sub-Saharan Africa” as two separate racial and cultural entities. Such a discourse of belonging that alienates west and central Africans (and also makes invisible the populations of the Sahel) must be urgently examined and challenged more than ever since it has direct implications for the lives of migrants both in Tunisia and Libya.
It is important to understand that the racialization of West and Central Africans in the region as the “other” is part of a larger discourse that reinforces the myth of northern Africa’s racial and ethnic homogeneity (i.e., Arabs, i.e., not black) and contributes to the stigmatization of dark-skinned northern Africans. It also resonates with how many in the northern region itself perceive themselves primarily as part of the Middle East, which has repressed the historical, cultural, and spatial dimensions of our identities as Africans who are indigenous to the continent and who have ancestral ties to populations from other parts of the continent. This notion of belonging, although historically inaccurate, has only worked to license violence against populations who already live very precarious lives and who are racially more connected to us than we would like to admit.
Additionally, it has also revived a long-standing colonial legacy of racial and ethnic labeling. The colonial remapping of the continent went hand-in-hand with a process of reinventing its populations. France used Social Darwinism in ways similar to other European imperial powers to study African populations. It was intent on de-Africanizing northern Africans (most of whom are Amazigh and indigenous to the continent) and racializing them as Arabs, while populations south of the Sahara became racialized as black and African. The British also attempted to label northern Africans. The British anti-slavery report, for instance, concluded that except for the small population of Fes, Moroccans are “coloured” people with some of their dignitaries being of the “darkest guinea dye.” This is yet another illustration of the arbitrariness with which colonial powers categorized African populations.
Decades later, we can see how this colonial practice persists and is used to perpetuate racism and xenophobia in the region. The French colonial invention of Arab vs African, or Arab vs black is still being reproduced in the 21st century. With this in mind, it was difficult to ignore the hypocrisy of French media outlets as they objected to Saied’s problematic statement. I watched with incredulity as they talked about his “anti-black” racism—the duplicity starkly unmissable in the objection since Saied was using the same colonial racial labeling that France invented and perpetuated in the first place. Saied has given the French media exactly what France needed: a chance to (re)produce racial and ethnic division in the continent, “a divide and conquer” approach that has been the state’s main strategy of colonization. I am in no way implying that this recuses northern African countries from racial violence and xenophobia. It certainly does not, but as France’s power and reputation are dwindling in the region the timing of President Saied’s words could not be more appropriate.
What has become increasingly evident in the last few years is the waning hold of France over its former colonies, in part due to growing intracontinental trade that is rendering the continent less dependent on France’s economy. President Emmanuel Macron’s desperate attempt to salvage his country’s reputation in the region during his “Africa Tour” in March was greeted with resounding protests and demonstrations. The irony could not be ignored as he proceeded to express France’s desire for a “more equitable” relationship with the continent, or what he called “new partnerships,” while making it abundantly clear that France had no intention of putting an end to its colonial policies. This tour came after his failed attempt to assert France’s power at the summit of the International Organization of Francophonie last year. The summit took place amid growing protests against France’s colonial policies, including its military intervention in the region, its exploitative financial policies, and its control of the continent’s natural resources. But Macron, undeterred, or perhaps unable and unwilling to read the signs, continued his colonial tirade, going as far as declaring French the universal language of the continent and the language of pan-Africanism!
There is a silver lining, nonetheless. The mobilization taking place in both Tunisia and Libya to protect the human rights of African migrants is promising. It is obvious that a public policy on immigration centered on the respect of human rights of migrants is the only way forward. In this regard, Morocco has been ahead of the curb. Faced with waves of violence against west African migrants almost a decade ago, Morocco developed a global immigration policy—the first of its kind in the region—that led to the regularization of 25,000 undocumented migrants from west and central Africa in 2014. This was followed by a second phase, launched in 2017, that saw the regularization of another 25,000 undocumented migrants. This by no means implies that Morocco is a haven for migrants. In fact, more reforms are needed, as migrants who arrived in the country post-2017 continue to find it extremely difficult to achieve legal status. But the case of Morocco indicates that developing immigration policies that protect the rights of migrants is the first step in limiting and countering violence.
Furthermore, because of the restrictive policies of European borders, the number of migrants to the northern regions of the continent continues to grow and necessitates a migration policy that is inclusive and sustainable. One hopes that the current investigation into Libya’s detention centers and violence against migrants brings more awareness about the breach of migrant and refugee rights in general. We in the northern region cannot afford to be xenophobic or hypocritical. As countries with high rates of emigration and with almost one-third of our populations residing in Europe (I am talking specifically about Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) we cannot look down on other African migrants nor criticize their human right to mobility.
Northern Africa is not facing a “foreign” presence as Saied would like us to believe, but a familiar one since the boundaries between what we consider the North and sub-Sahara (without excluding the Sahel) have always been fluid and permeable. It is this permeability that offers resistance and remains in stark contrast to the colonial spatial division of “Arabs” and “Africans.”
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.
Politics
Bloody Times: Sudan’s Counter-Revolutionary War
Despite its foreign allies and legitimizers, the military has failed to crush the new self-organized peoples’ committees. The popular revolutionary forces have held power in the streets for more than 1000 days and the resistance cannot be easily broken.
In April 2019, an alliance of civilian forces in Sudan finally removed Omar al-Bashir’s genocidal militaro-Islamist regime. After years of continuous rebellions, the alliance of workers, students, progressive women, youths, small farmers, and cultural workers created resistance committees to direct energies at fully disrupting the military’s chokehold over the society. From December 2018 to April 2019 the tempo of the demonstrations and rebellions forced sections of the military to oust Bashir. After the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir’s government, there was a power sharing agreement between the military and civilians. The Constitutional Declaration of August 2019 created the Transitional Sovereignty Council where the emphasis was on the transitional arrangements, underlining the commitment for the military to hand over power by April 2022.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan became the chairman of the Sovereignty Council. General Burhan had also served as a regional army commander in Darfur, in western Sudan, when approximately 300,000 people were killed, and millions of others displaced in fighting from 2003 to 2008. This genocidal violence was widely publicized in Africa, with loud calls for Bashir and his generals to be held accountable for the killings in Darfur. General Burhan had acted pre-emptively when the popular demonstrations exposed the atrocities of the military. Thus, in spite of the fact that al-Burhan had been closely aligned with Bashir, he manoeuvred to take control of the military and the transition by removing Lt. Gen. Awad Mohamed Ahmed Ibn Auf. Al-Burhan presented himself as an opponent of Bashir by pretending to side with the protesting masses who were calling for the removal of the military and the dismantling of militias.
Al-Burhan’s deputy in this moment of Machiavellian machinations was Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo had achieved international notoriety as a commander of the notorious Janjaweed militias responsible for the genocidal violence in Darfur. His paramilitary forces, organized within the faction called Rapid Support Forces (RSF), were Bashir’s shock troops whose government became a mercenary force fighting for the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen, and for General Khalifa Haftar’s war in Libya. After 2015, there were up to 15,000 Sudanese military and paramilitary deployed by the Saudis to fight the Houthis. Flush with resources from the alliance with Russia in the gold mining and export sector, the RSF had in a short period amassed millions of dollars. General Burhan had tolerated the alliance with Dagalo but had become increasingly concerned as Dagalo built up his militia forces to over 100,000.
It is these two factions from the Darfur mess that are at war with each other to decide which faction will prevail to crush the Sudanese people. The clash between the two had intensified following the 2021 military coup that ended the civilian role in the transition, and broke out in open warfare on the weekend of 15 April 2023. The alliance between al-Burhan and Dagalo had been a marriage of convenience as neither faction supported the breaking of the economic power of the military and the militias. A genuine transition away from militaristic oppression and the cheapening of human life demanded breaking the economic power of the military in state and commercial institutions.
Organized in a manner similar to the military capitalists in Egypt, through the military and intelligence services, top generals were involved in more than 400 of the major state enterprises, including agricultural conglomerates, banks, telecommunications, medical equipment import companies, gold mining, transport, and real estate. With this economic supremacy, the military refused to hand over power. As the date for the handover of control to civilians became closer, al-Burhan staged a coup d’état on 25 October 2021 with the support of Dagalo, ousting the civilian government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
The alliance between al-Burhan and Dagalo had been a marriage of convenience as neither faction supported the breaking of the economic power of the military and the militias.
The 2021 removal of the civilian prime minister came in the wake of efforts to give teeth to the “Commission for Dismantling the June 30, 1989 Regime, Removal of Empowerment and Corruption, and Recovering Public Funds.” The civilian minister and the civilian bureaucrats were not only exposing and uprooting the network of companies owned by the Islamists forced out of power in 2019, but also the tentacles of the commercial empires owned by senior generals. The civilian leadership wanted access to the vast sums available to the generals. Hamdok had become increasingly outspoken in his criticism of the military’s entanglement in the economy and both generals felt threatened by the objective to dismantle the military’s economic stranglehold.
April 2019 to April 2023: From uprising to revolution
The 2019 uprisings in Sudan brought together all the forces fighting for social change. Organized under the umbrella of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) the alliance brought together workers, students, progressive intellectuals, cultural artists, farmers, and professionals in a loose, but democratic network. The Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) created a new political force in Sudan. But the FFC included the traditional political careerists who had sold out the Sudanese people on numerous occasions since independence in 1956. The FFC was itself being challenged by more progressive elements in Sudan. The base of this opposition to compromise with the military were the youth and mobilized progressive women. Resistance committees emerged in all parts of the country to organize the uprisings, oppose the military, and hold the FFC accountable. When the FFC dithered in declaring their complete opposition to militarism, the progressive women and youths pushed the demands for change beyond elections and power sharing. It was within the struggles between the resistance committees and the military that the uprisings evolved from protests to a revolutionary situation.
The three elements that Vladimir Lenin recognized as central to the revolutionary situation were now apparent in Sudan: (i) When it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to rule in the old way; (ii) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (iii) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but in turbulent times are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action.
All of these three elements of the revolutionary situation had emerged in Sudan when the upper classes were unable to rule in the old ways. Incessant negotiations between the military and their supporters in Washington, Paris, Riyadh, Dubai and Moscow failed to weaken the protracted popular struggles. The military proceeded to shoot down the people in the streets. With every demonstration and neighbourhood confrontation, the militant resistance committees matured to become a defensive front against militarism, exploitation, divisions, and manipulation. Young Sudanese women emerged as the vanguard force pushing the ideas of revolutionary change and opposing the Arabist/Islamist consciousness that had been unleashed to divide this multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious society. The traditional middle strata and their bureaucrats who were looking to London, Washington, and Dubai could not keep abreast with the changing resistance on the ground. These were the forces led by Hamdok that were swept aside on 25 October 2021, leaving the confrontation between the military and their imperial backers on one side and the organized resistance of the mobilized popular forces on the other.
Objective alliance between Washington and Moscow in Sudan
After the removal of Omar al-Bashir, the United States and the European Union worked hand in glove with the United Nations to orchestrate a transition process that would disempower the people. Western embassies in Khartoum organized numerous meetings to feel out the depth of the popular mobilization. The United States worked with Israel to build new relations between the genocidal generals of Sudan by bringing the generals into the so-called Abraham Accords. The generals under Bashir had fought for France and the US in Libya to remove Gaddafi, had fought in Chad, and were fighting in Yemen. As an inducement to collaborate with Israel and Saudi Arabia, Sudan was removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
This collaboration between Israel and the generals formed part of the regional strategy by a section of global capital to isolate Iran. The regional alignment against Iran included Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. The European Union created its own alliance with the militarists by pledging hundreds of millions of euros for the “Khartoum Process”, a multinational effort to empower the Hemedti militia forces to manage migration from the Horn of Africa to Europe. This opened a new front for human trafficking by the RSF.
The United States and the European Union worked hand in glove with the United Nations to orchestrate a transition process that would disempower the people.
Objectively, Russia was part of this grouping with the Western oppressive forces in the Sudan. Of the two military factions, the Russians were in a firm alliance with the gold traders and hustlers through the Wagner private security group. Both factions of the military were and are highly dependent on Russia for military capital. China was a silent partner in this unprincipled array of forces. The Chinese capitalists worked with all sides in the region: Israel, Iran, Qatar and the Wahabist conservative religious forces. As the crisis of capitalism intensified, the Russians had gained a foothold in the mining and export of gold from Sudan.
This alliance between the Emiratis, Saudis, Sudanese, and Israeli forces in the plunder of the gold fields came to international attention as the Western propaganda organs identified the Wagner Group as the prime beneficiary of the plunder of the gold fields in the Darfur region. The Wagner group of paramilitary capitalists from Russia built a formidable alliance with the RSF forces to the point where the capital resources of the RSF placed them in a position to challenge the established military that were involved in accumulation through the state.
The lucrative gold mining and trading operations of the RSF gave confidence to the faction of the military under Hemedti. The alliance started to crumble when the older “professional military forces” sought to dismantle the RSF and militia forces. Under the terms of the transition to democratic rule in the Sudan, the military had sought immunity from the National Security Service (NSC) for the criminal activities unleashed since the Bashir pogroms. After the 2021 coup d’état, the progressive forces had coalesced into a more coherent force to oppose the military. These forces placed the three Nos on the table: No negotiation, No partnership, No foreign military intervention.
The generals under Bashir had fought for France and the US in Libya to remove Gaddafi, had fought in Chad, and were fighting in Yemen.
The coalescing of the popular forces was manifest in the completion of the Revolutionary Charter For Establishing People’s Power (RCEPP). The Charter made explicit the position of the resistance committees that there would be “overall reform and restructuring of the armed forces, including review of its laws, tasks, responsibilities and force size, resulting in a unified and professional national army, capable of playing its main role of safeguarding the people, the constitution and the country’s borders.” This alliance of progressive forces opposed the Framework Agreement between one faction of the resistance and the military. The Framework Agreement signed on December 2022 retreated from the demands of the 1989 Regime: removal of empowerment and corruption, and recovery of public funds. The pact outlining the Framework Agreement set no date for a final agreement or the appointment of a prime minister and there were differences on sensitive issues including the dismantling of the militias.
Due to the fact that the RCEPP had published its demands and the requirements for a genuine transition, those parties and militia forces that wanted to do deals with Washington to isolate the revolutionaries were themselves isolated. In their isolation, the two strong military factions began to attack each other.
Both factions would not heed the call of the people for accountability for the crimes of the Bashir regime. This call for accountability within the society was made explicit in the following statement:
“Accountability shall include individuals who organized and participated in war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocides and ethnic cleansings in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, the southern Blue Nile, South Sudan, eastern Sudan, Khartoum, and other parts of the country. All individuals who participated in the crimes during and after the December Revolution shall be brought to trial inside Sudan and by the Sudanese, in accordance with the Interim Constitution, which shall stipulate for the legal process of the trials through establishing special immediate trials.”
Both factions of the military are opposed to the calls for accountability and for the new interim power forces to “combat all practices of corruption, recovery of looted public funds and assets, and restore privatized companies through a Commission of Combating Corruption and Recovery of Looted Public Funds and Assets”. Both factions are also opposed to the plans of the resistance committees to “place all state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as well as those owned by the military, intelligence and police services under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance”.
Changed regional situation
The global insecurity generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected all parts of the world. Additionally, the weaponization of finance and the freezing of Russian assets created alarm in all parts of the world. If the US Treasury could freeze US$600 billion, then it could act against other countries. There was renewed interest in many countries to seek relations with the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) formation and the BRICS bank. In the midst of the global financial uncertainty generated by the US banking system, the Chinese brokered a de-escalation of tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Additionally, the Saudis had reduced oil production to push up prices, despite President Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia to plead for an increase in production to offset the challenges faced by Europe because of the sanctions against Russia.
The tiff between the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the US threw the regional alliances into a predicament. When Chinese diplomatic efforts brought about a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the future of the Sudanese mercenary forces fighting the Houthis was put in question; the Sudanese military would have to be withdrawn from Yemen. Secondly, the premises of the Abraham Accords that had brought about the alliance between the military and the Israelis were now in doubt. There could no longer be a focus on Iran when the right-wing anti-people government of Israel was unleashing violence and oppression inside and outside Israel. The Saudis, Egyptians, Sudanese and Moroccans who were willing to sacrifice the rights of the Palestinian peoples were now faced with a choice: join with Israel and the US against the Palestinians, or join with the Palestinians, the Egyptian and Sudanese masses to oppose militarism and fundamentalism. Russia was now faced with the question of how to move forward with its agreement with Israel in Syria. The contradictions within contradictions in Sudan and in the region broke out in the fighting between the RSF and the military. The two factions are fighting to decide which faction would emerge as the ally of Washington to crush the resistance committees.
Maturation of the revolutionary situation in the Sudan
The two military factions of the counter-revolution that are today fighting each other have for the past three years killed hundreds if not thousands of people who are agitating for a new political dispensation. Despite being shot down in the streets, the resistance committees have demonstrated another form of robust people’s power by their resistance and by forming the nucleus of a new state.
Despite its foreign allies and legitimizers, the military has failed to crush the new self-organized peoples’ committees. In the midst of the fighting between the two factions, the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA) and the resistance committees have called for the people to form neighbourhood peace committees:
“We call on the forces of the living revolution, including the resistance committees in the neighborhoods, trade union forces, and professional bodies, to take the initiative to protect neighborhoods in villages, towns and cities, through the formation of (community peace committees). We are fully aware of the absence of the state and its institutions, and we have no choice but to activate the role of our peaceful civil society and the forces of the living revolution that have been the capital of our local communities for a long time.”
The community peace committees will bring the Sudanese revolution into the phase of armed self-defence.
The name calling and fighting between the two factions of the military will continue to unleash death and destruction in the Sudan. But the accumulated experiences over the past three years have ensured that the resistance cannot be easily broken; the popular revolutionary forces have held power in the streets for more than 1000 days.
Those who have studied the rhythm of revolution and counter-revolution over the past 150 years will remember the writings of Karl Marx who had celebrated the fighters of the Paris Commune. In his communication to the First International, Marx commented positively on the communards surviving more than 71 days. Then, the communards were crushed by the invading German army.
When Chinese diplomatic efforts brought about a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the future of the Sudanese mercenary forces fighting the Houthis was put in question.
There is no invading army to save either side in the current counter-revolutionary war in the Sudan. Both sides will fight to the death to remain in power.
The major outside forces that can make a difference now are two: the first is Russia, which is connected to Hamdan and the RSF through the gold trade. The second is the Egyptian military; the military capitalists in Sudan have long historical links with the Egyptian militarists and Islamists. Other smaller elements include the military of Eritrea, which Hemedti recently visited.
Progressive forces internationally must call for the arrest and trial of the military forces that have unleashed genocidal violence on the Sudanese peoples since 1989. The Resistance Committees’ and the popular forces are calling for solidarity and non-intervention to push the process of transition from militarism to one where the peoples of Sudan can enter into new relations.
Progressives internationally must transcend the propaganda war of the bourgeois forces who are quaking at the prospect of this counter-revolution inspiring millions of Egyptians who can take courage from Sudan if their leaders continue in the alliance with Israel against the Palestinian peoples.
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