▁There. There are diseases that affect humans and diseases that affect animals and those that affect society and other countries, i.e., God there are diseases that affect countries, starting with the cold, the flu, the state sneezes and then narrows itself until it is sneezed. States, like individuals, do not die at once, but are slowly crushed by ills until they reach a point where no doctor or medicine will work. As the people of Sudan say, “The disease of death is what begins.”
▁Diseases It is a disease of states, plagued by politicians who are unable to plan and short-sighted, clinging to power as if it were a personal inheritance. People eat people’s money, and they look at public money as a prize, leaving no public right but extended hands, even if it is a solution in the eyes of society. When ignorance is mixed with power, the disease becomes chronic, and the disease itself becomes the doctor.
In a war economy, where rules change and priorities change, vision and insight become a condition for survival. However, the Sudanese case reveals a flounder that is becoming almost a system of governance. The Council of Kamel Idriss Idrissy, which seems to belong to the waiting community, treats a war-weary people as if the sheer stupidity of it were written on it. Prohibition of goods, interdiction of others, and continuous increases in levies and fees, and spending of what remains in the treasury of the country and what remains in the pockets of slaves, until the citizen pays the bill of war and the bill of mismanagement at the same time.
For many, the failure of the entire Idris government is no longer just a slippage, but a state of inability to read reality and deal with its crises. The national currency is collapsing, markets are tumultuous, people are chasing for a living as thirst chases mirages, while impromptu decisions continue as if the country is prosperous rather than in distress. A state that cannot manage a war economy quickly becomes captive to economic warfare.
▪️ We have seen the fall of many regimes, and we have seen governments eaten by their crises, but we have not seen the fall of the state and society at once. Regimes fall when those who govern them are unable to manage them and are devoured by crises, but the fall of society is the harshest face, when civil wars begin, and the people fight each other, and the old nerves return, and the tribe becomes a homeland, and the homeland becomes just a memory.
When states enter the stage of the disease of death, governments do not fall alone, but withdraw with them the institutions, values, economy and prestige of the law. Society emerges from under the cloak of the state in search of refuge in the tribe, the region, or the gun. When crises peak, the question is no longer who rules, but what remains of the homeland?
Thus, Kamel Idris’s country seems to be facing not just a government crisis, but an existential crisis. When power fails to see the fire burning under its feet, it does not fall alone, but brings down with it an entire people, a nation exhausted by wars and exhausted by crises, until it finds itself standing on the edge of an abyss, in which nothing is heard but the groaning of hunger, the echo of guns, and the call of a lost homeland among the rubble.
*Awadallah Nwai, Director of OnePress Agency for Investigative Journalism*
