Why can only Civilian Rule Deliver Peace and the Credibility That Recovery Requires
Sudan Scope Editorial Board
There is a number that should end every argument about what ails Sudan’s economy. It is not the inflation rate, though it was 112% last year, remaining among the world’s highest. It is not the unemployment rate, though at 60.6% it is the highest among any economy the IMF tracks. It is this: 62.4% of Sudanese firms that closed their doors cite insecurity, not taxes, not credit, not regulation, as the reason they closed (UNDP, 2026). The economy is not failing because policy is wrong. It is failing because the country is at war, and because the men waging that war also control the commanding heights of its economy.
Three years in, the ledger is unambiguous. Average incomes fell back to where they stood in 1992; a generation of progress was erased. Seven million people were pushed into extreme poverty in a single year. More than thirteen million are displaced. If the fighting continues to 2030, the UNDP and the Institute for Security Studies project that another 34 million Sudanese, a population larger than Ghana’s, will fall into extreme poverty, and that national output in 2043 will be US$34.5 billion smaller than it would have been without war. The pound has lost roughly 86% of its value since April 2023. These are not the symptoms of a mismanaged economy. They are the symptoms of a country being consumed.
And yet the response from the authorities has been a parade of technical gestures. In April, the customs dollar was raised 16%, as if a valuation adjustment could conjure revenue from an economy whose tax base has been shelled, looted, and displaced. The identical move in August 2022, a 27% increase, yielded nothing durable; there is no reason this one will be different. In the same month came restrictions on “luxury” imports: biscuits, mineral water, ready-made garments. The entire restricted basket is worth less than US$200 million against an import bill above US$6 billion. This is not economic policy. It is theater performed for a captive audience.
The pattern is not incompetence. It is a structure. A state whose budget is consumed by war-making cannot invest in recovery. A central bank forced to monetize deficits cannot defend a currency. And a security establishment with commercial tentacles in gold, agriculture, banking, and trade cannot be the referee of an economy in which it is the dominant player. The gold figures tell the story with brutal clarity: Sudan produced roughly 70 tons in 2025, yet official exports were under 15 tons. The gap is not a rounding error. It is a parallel fiscal system, wealth that leaves the country through networks that the war economy protects, while the state begs for wheat financing.
This is why the case for civilian rule is not, at bottom, a moral argument, though it is also that. It is an economic one. Sudan’s brief transitional period, from September 2019 to October 2021, remains the only recent stretch in which the country had a credible reform trajectory: an IMF-supported program, arrears clearance in motion, debt relief within reach, subsidy and exchange-rate reforms underway. Every one of those gains was destroyed by the October 2021 coup, not eroded, destroyed, and the war that followed eighteen months later was its direct descendant. The men with guns have now run the experiment twice. The results are in.
Skeptics will answer that civilian governments in Sudan’s history were weak, fractious, short-lived. All true. But weakness is remediable with institutions, support, and time; a war economy is not remediable at all, because its beneficiaries profit precisely from the conditions that impoverish everyone else. No general will dismantle the security-business networks that sustain him. No junta will restore the policy credibility that investors, donors, and the IMF require; credibility is exactly what a coup destroys. Peace signed between armed factions, with the same commercial empires intact, would merely freeze the predation in place.
Peace is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Durable recovery requires what only a legitimate civilian government can supply: the authority to dismantle military commercial empires, the credibility to unlock international financing, and the accountability that makes reform stick rather than serve as a new mask for old rackets. The reform agenda itself is well understood: stabilization, a unified exchange rate, a widened tax base, state-enterprise reform, a rebuilt banking system. What Sudan lacks is not a plan. It is a government with a reason to implement one.
The UNDP’s scenarios give the country a choice with numbers attached: a recovery path in which GDP reaches US$58.2 billion by 2043, and 17.3 million people escape extreme poverty, or a protracted war in which extreme poverty engulfs more than 60% of the population. Between those futures stands a single political fact. Only civilian rule can bring Sudan the peace it needs, because only civilian rule severs the link between power and plunder that started this war and now feeds on it. Everything else, every customs decree, every import ban, every communiqué, is an attempt to repair, at gunpoint, what the gun itself has broken.
