When Estimates Failed… How Reassuring Illusions Led to State Collapse
Mohannad Awad Mahmoud
In January 2018, at the height of official concern over deteriorating economic conditions, a five-page analytical report was presented within a specialised policy centre. It offered an early reading of where the crisis might lead, warning that if living conditions continued to worsen, the situation would not remain merely an economic problem, but would evolve into a mobilisable force capable of driving large-scale public unrest.
This was not a vague political conjecture, but a direct reading of plainly visible indicators: a rapidly declining exchange rate, erratic central bank decisions, fiscal policies that reacted rather than planned, and an overall environment managed without a clear strategic compass. For anyone willing to see it, the picture was sufficiently complete to anticipate what might unfold.
The report circulated widely across state institutions, prompting a directive to convene an official workshop to discuss it. Yet what took place in that workshop was not a serious attempt to understand the warning—it was closer to putting it on trial. The report was not treated as an alert to prepare for, but as a hypothesis to be disproved. The prevailing conclusion settled on a reassuring narrative: political parties were weak, the left was at its lowest ebb, the street was unlikely to mobilise, and the crisis—however severe—would remain within controllable limits.
The Problem Was Not Disagreement, But Bias
The issue was not the mere existence of differing assessments, but that this divergence was not neutral—it was entirely biased towards what was comforting rather than what was cautionary. Here lies the real story: not that the state lacked information, but that, despite possessing it, it chose not to believe it.
The report clearly indicated that the economic situation constituted fertile ground for both political and armed opposition. It pointed out that the experience of the September 2013 protests—where economic grievances were leveraged against the state—could be repeated on a broader and more organised scale. This was not a subtle message requiring deep interpretation. Yet it was simply not taken seriously. Instead, it was diluted within closed rooms through comforting assessments that reality would soon expose as fragile.
From Warning to Denial
What followed was not a surprise to those who had tracked the indicators—it was the natural outcome of a prolonged trajectory of denial. The economic crisis did not by itself produce the explosion, but it provided the fuel. Other environments—political, media, and organisational—supplied the spark and direction.
Here lies a crucial distinction:
between legitimate public anger and a political trajectory that capitalised on that anger and propelled it beyond protest.
More concerning, official messaging remained, until the final moments, trapped in a logic of reassurance. The issue was not a lack of data, but a failure in how that data was processed. When reassurance is repeated in the face of escalating indicators, the problem ceases to be a mere error in judgement—it becomes a mode of thinking, one that prioritises psychological comfort over confronting reality.
A Deeper Structural Question
This raises a necessary question:
Was what happened simply a case of collective miscalculation?
Or was there a deeper flaw that made it difficult—or undesirable—to acknowledge the scale of the threat?
Because failure at this scale cannot be explained by weak analysis alone; it suggests a structural issue within the decision-making architecture itself.
The aim here is not to assign blame, but to understand. Yet understanding leads to an unavoidable conclusion:
The state did not collapse suddenly; it collapsed when threats were excluded, when reassuring narratives became more acceptable than alarming ones, and when analytical institutions shifted from early warning systems into producers of reassurance.
Beyond Simplistic Narratives
Any meaningful reading of what occurred cannot be reduced to slogans—whether those that glorify the event or those that deny it altogether. The reality, as the facts suggest, is far more complex:
A genuine crisis
Legitimate public anger
Organised political exploitation
And a failure in assessment environments—whether through incapacity or unwillingness
It is precisely at this intersection that the path to the present moment was formed.
The Central Question Today
After the state has paid such a heavy price, the value of revisiting this moment does not lie in scoring points or redistributing blame. It lies in confronting a far more critical question:
Has the mode of thinking that led to that failure actually changed?
Or are we still reproducing the same pattern—
seeing the indicators, hearing the warnings,
and ultimately choosing to believe what reassures us
rather than what reveals the truth?
Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=13348