The Sudanese Economy Between the Collapse of Value and the Absence of Vision: From a Liquidity Crisis to a Crisis of the State

By Mohannad Awad Mahmoud

The question in Sudan is no longer when the economy recover? The more dangerous question has become: is there still an economy, in the true sense of the word, that can be saved at all?
The phase the country has entered is no longer one of recession or temporary strangulation, but one of deep economic disintegration, where value is steadily eroded, and decisions are absent. Economic activity is transformed from an organised system of production into mere individual attempts at survival.
In conventional crises, indicators decline and then recover as conditions improve or the state intervenes. What Sudan is experiencing today, however, is a collapse in the very logic of the economy itself. The relationship between work, production, and value has broken down; the market no longer responds to traditional incentives. Liquidity is scarce, but more dangerously, trust has almost vanished—and when trust collapses, numbers lose their meaning.
The liquidity crisis that everyone speaks of is merely a symptom of a much deeper illness. Money has not disappeared; it has exited the economic cycle. Capital today is either outside the country, frozen in illiquid assets, or deliberately withheld by its owners out of fear of what lies ahead. This renders any talk of stimulating the market without addressing the roots of the dysfunction little more than a political or media illusion.
The national currency—supposed to function as a medium of exchange and a store of value—has become a burden. Citizens hold it only out of necessity; traders price their goods in dollars; investors calculate everything beyond it. This disconnection between the currency and the real economy means the state has lost one of its most important sovereign tools: the ability to steer economic activity.
The banking sector, for its part, is no longer an intermediary for development, but a defensive institution whose primary objective is self-preservation rather than market financing. High mark-ups are not merely a product of greed; they are a direct reflection of uncertainty. Banks do not know what the economy will look like in a year, what the currency will be worth in six months, or whether any sector can endure. They therefore raise costs to protect their capital—killing what little activity remains in the process.
As for production—the core of any economy—its backbone has been broken. Agriculture operates with primitive tools; industry is either destroyed or has migrated; services survive on consumption rather than on the creation of real value. The state thus shifts from being a potential producer to a permanent importer—not because it lacks resources, but because it has lost the capacity to organise them.
More alarming still is that the Sudanese economy has entered a phase of losing its compass. There are no clear priorities, no selected sectors for rescue, no data-driven preferential policies. Everything is managed reactively rather than proactively. When an economy is run in this manner, decisions are always late—even when they are theoretically correct.
In such an environment, societal behaviour itself changes. The middle class erodes; risk-taking is replaced by migration; investment turns into hoarding or capital flight. Over time, people lose faith that working within the country can yield a better future. This is the most dangerous stage of collapse, because rebuilding trust is far more difficult than rebuilding factories.
The state is therefore facing not merely a financial crisis, but a crisis of economic governance. The absence of a unified economic decision-making centre, the lack of a strategic mind overseeing capital flows, and the lack of early-warning analytical tools leave the economy exposed to internal or external shocks.
No state can regain its balance without recognising that economic security is no less important than military security. A state without a functioning economy does not truly possess its own decision-making power, regardless of how much force it commands.
The solution does not begin with injecting money or announcing recovery packages, but with redefining the economic role of the state: from spectator to regulator, from tax collector to partner, and from blind spender to intelligent catalyst of productive activity.
It also begins with understanding a simple truth: capital does not return because of rhetoric, but because of implementable policies, reasonable profitability, and predictable stability—not merely promised stability.
If the state does not swiftly move to build a realistic economic vision—one that distinguishes between what can be saved and what must be deferred, and that restores the primacy of real production—what will be drained will not only be money, but time. And time, in economics as in politics, cannot be recovered.
Sudan does not suffer from a scarcity of resources, but from a scarcity of decision-making.
An economy does not collapse when money disappears, but when vision does.

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