A combination of domestic corruption, Western hypocrisy and incompetence explain why the billions raised by the West to help democratize the long-suffering African country have failed.
When Omar Al-Bashir was overthrown, it was seen by the international community as a historic opportunity for the transition of a dictatorship to a democracy. It is recalled that the work of the transition was undertaken by a special Council of politicians and soldiers chaired by General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, who is currently at “knives” with the leader of the paramilitaries, General Dagalo.
So, the USA then promised to support the transition with a one-time amount of 700 million dollars, while every year they would offer 600 million dollars. In total, the money that the West would give each year – mainly the USA – to Sudan to help (combating poverty, violence, etc.) exceeded 1 billion dollars.
The money would be channeled through the UN, NGOs and contractors who would manage a host of programs, such as monitoring the violence in Sudan, buying Sudanese wheat and paying the salaries of the staff of Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok, a rather promising technocrat, who he had worked at Deloitte, which seemed to want to sort out the post-dictatorship mess.
The Investigation that presents the harsh truth about management by Westerners
However, the programs had little success, as, according to the American journalist Justin Lynch who participated in an impressive investigation with his colleagues titled (“Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy. The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution” Willow Berridge, Alex de Waal, and Justin Lynch), western solutions did not address the fundamental root causes of violence and corruption with the climate seemingly skewed from the start.
The journalist stayed in Sudan in 2019 to experience the post-revolutionary wave up close, working at the UN and NGOs, conducting interviews with activists, soldiers, and the prime minister himself.
As the investigation found, Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok had no real political power under the “transitional” Constitution, which made the international community wary of whether there was indeed a transition to democracy. Hamdock, and other technocrats in government lacked the political skills to use what little influence they had against the mighty Army.
The first step to jump-start reconstruction and improve the miserable lives of the Sudanese was for Washington to lift Sudan’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. It was “the key to everything we can do in this country,” Hamdock explained to the Associated Press as early as 2019, while his country’s economy, even after the pandemic hit, shrank by 3.6% in 2020.
The excuse given by US officials who spoke to Justin Lynch was that they did not want the money to end up in the hands of the military, as they were not convinced that the Sudanese transition was “real”. When suddenly in October 2020 they made the decision, they asked for… in return. The eventual financial aid was tied to Sudan’s recognition of Israel under the Abraham Accords. “Despite US rhetoric in support of Sudan’s transition to democracy, in practice the US was stalling,” Lynch says.
But even when money came in, many of the programs supported vested interests at the expense of what Hamdock needed.
The coordination was absent
By the end of 2021, much of the $700 million had not been paid by the US, while at the same time diplomats from other embassies were admitting that they gave money to UN agencies in Sudan even though they knew it would be ineffective, just because they didn’t know how to leverage them themselves during their budget cycle!
Money spent on productive programs was rarely coordinated, so there was massive duplication of aid from each donor country. There was a case where the prime minister’s communications department was funded three times by three different donors who simply did not get along. While Hamdok needed hot money fast to make electricity and bread available he got an “army” of Western advisers who didn’t really know about Sudan just implementing very expensive programs with rare success.
Under Bashir’s government, the Humanitarian Aid Commission was under the umbrella of the country’s intelligence agency. Intelligence agencies have been masterful at stealing, reducing or blocking foreign aid. Foreign aid was used as a tool of political coercion by the old regime. Nevertheless, according to the authors’ research, this system of coercion remained under the transitional government, with Hamdock admitting that he was powerless to deal with the military and intelligence services that profited from corruption.
No effort from Western diplomats
The history of Western aid is replete with examples of embezzlement or outright blocking of remittances. They said the Army blocked the coronavirus tests because they saw them as insider help that might threaten their coercion system, even threatening the UN official with deportation if they went public.
Also, in order to be included in the humanitarian aid lists, many women were forced to have sex with local leaders appointed by the transitional government. “If the result of the people working in the aid programs to bring money to the leaders is to buy women, that’s not good,” one woman told Lynch. Yet, no effort has been made by diplomats to stop this horror, despite the billions pouring into Sudan.
Money milking UN people
UN mechanisms may have prioritized Sudan’s democratic transition, but its results have been hard to see. In 2020, the UN established the UN Integrated Transitional Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS). Much to Lynch’s surprise, senior UN officials undermined aid in Sudan because they saw the creation of UNITAMS as an opportunity to get more money for their services.
The journalist was surprised to hear the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Sudan, Paula Emerson, argue that UNITAMS should not have peacekeeping forces, because without troops there would be more money for other UN agencies such as hers. “It’s not enough that UN agencies were funded through other mechanisms,” comments Lynch, but Emerson “ignores the new round of conflict in Darfur” with more than 430,000 people displaced between January and October 2021.
This attitude of Emerson’s appeared to “value milking money at all costs and political careers over actually helping the Sudanese” while her agency “blocked efforts to detail the crimes in Darfur that had been committed with her help government”.
UN people were grabbing money
According to the American journalist, every time a senior diplomat planned a photo shoot in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, it was days before a visit by UN officials to put their agency logos on water tanks, trucks and other objects. At the same time, however, water, food and clothes were scarce!
“I often felt that the goal of the UN and some NGOs was to grab more money instead of actually helping people. The diplomats left for their photo ops with their teams congratulating each other on a successful visit. Meanwhile, the humanitarian response has been uncoordinated and failed in key tasks such as preventing gender-based violence,” Lynch complains.
Thousands may have died had it not been for humanitarian aid, he points out, but that was “no excuse that the response” to the refugee crisis “in Ethiopia has been appallingly mismanaged by the UN despite being fully funded”.
Let Sudan’s suffering become a lesson
Of course, the American journalist emphatically emphasizes: “Don’t be fooled, the Sudanese army and politicians are responsible for the fate of their country. Legacies of corruption and violence remained after Bashir’s fall. This meant that Sudan’s transition was always going to be bumpy – if it ever worked.”
However, he warns that “the lessons from the international community’s aid to Sudan are important, because Bashir will not be the last dictator to be overthrown.”
