In a single week, three pictures came together of an economy trying to stand on its feet. On Monday, November 2, the Minister of Finance chaired a meeting of the Macroeconomic Framework Committee to prepare the 2027 budget, attended by the Governor of the Central Bank of Sudan and the Central Bureau of Statistics, and the meeting affirmed reducing borrowing from the banking system, controlling spending and directing resources to the productive sectors, with the budget guidelines to be submitted to the Council of Ministers within the same week and completed before the end of November (Source: Sudan News Agency - SUNA, November 2, 2026). On the same day, the Governor of the Central Bank of Sudan chaired an expanded meeting on gold exports, which discussed the imbalance in the return of export proceeds and called for a flexible and fair pricing mechanism linked to world prices, a review of transfer restrictions, diversification of gold markets and curbing smuggling (Source: SUNA, November 2, 2026).
The third picture came from the sea. The northern port in Port Sudan received during October 13 ships with a cargo of 516,253 tons, led by wheat at about 255.8 thousand tons, alongside flour, sugar, oils, coal, iron and equipment (Source: SUNA data published on November 3, 2026). These are not numbers for celebration, but simple evidence that the institutions of the state, when they work, remain capable of feeding the country and running its trade. A working port, a central bank that regulates, and a ministry of finance that plans: this is the backbone of any real recovery.
But numbers alone are not enough. Sudan's gold has for years left the mines in Darfur, Kordofan, the north and the east, and its return does not come back in full to the public treasury. If smuggling remains wider than the official channels, no carefully written budget will be of use, the exchange rate will remain under pressure, and the citizen will pay the price in bread, medicine and fuel. What the central bank meeting put forward — fair pricing, diversification of markets and easing the transfer of proceeds — is the right direction, provided it turns into stable rules that do not change with the change of persons, and that the small producer and exporter, before the large one, feel that the official route is more worthwhile than the smuggling route.
The 2027 budget, in turn, will have no meaning if it turns into a budget of persons and platforms. The Sudanese tried the Qaht elite, which ran the economy with slogans and quotas until trust collapsed, and before it they tried the rule of the Islamists, which turned the state into party spoils, and today they do not need a narrow pan-Arab project that reduces a diverse country to a single identity. Sudan's economy is one in its diversity: the gold of the west, the port of the east, the agriculture of the centre and Al-Jazira, the wealth of the north, and an unbroken link with South Sudan and with expatriates who send their savings to their families in every state. Any policy that does not see all of this diversity will reproduce division, even if it raises the slogan of unity.
What we defend here is clear: strong institutions above individuals, a single national army as an institution of the state and not a platform for personal ambition, and transparent economic rules that protect the producer and preserve the right of the state. We do not ask the reader to believe a promise, but to follow verifiable numbers: how much did the gold proceeds returned through the official channels reach? Did borrowing from the banking system actually decrease, as the budget promised? And did the port maintain October's pace in the coming months?
If the coming months answer these questions with numbers, then talk of recovery will have begun in earnest. But if the gold keeps fleeing, the budget remains ink, and the port a passing news item, we will have wasted another opportunity. Sudan lacks neither gold nor a port nor minds; it lacks only that its institutions work without tutelage from a person or a party, for one people in one homeland.
— Al-Tayeb Hamad
