Sudan: with drones, the power grid becomes a weapon of war

According to RFI, Sudan's power grid is on the brink of collapse after fresh drone strikes, on Monday 2 November, on several electrical facilities. The strikes are attributed to the paramilitary forces fighting the Sudanese army. The rest, what follows, is our reading and not facts established by the dispatch.

What we do not yet know: the details of the sites hit, the number of people left without power, any casualties. The dispatch, in the version available to us, does not specify, and we will not fill the gap with invented figures. Let us simply recall what a power cut means in a country at war: hospitals that depend on generators and fuel, water pumps that stop, food that rots, phones that fall silent when people need to raise the alarm or look for relatives. It is civilians, first, who pay the price for every transformer destroyed.

One can see a logic here: striking electricity means striking an entire country without committing a single infantryman. The grid is no longer merely infrastructure; it becomes a lever of pressure on the population and on whoever claims to govern them. According to RFI, the strikes are attributed to the paramilitaries; the interest is clear for a force that wants to show its adversary no longer controls anything, not even the light. But the attribution remains, at this stage, the one the outlet reports, and we cite it as such.

Then there is the structural question, the one that is readily avoided in the capitals that comment on this conflict from a distance. In the tradition of dependency theory, peripheral economies were shaped to supply raw materials and labour to the centre, not to guarantee their inhabitants a solid public service. A fragile, concentrated, easy-to-target power grid is also the legacy of a development oriented towards export rather than local needs. We do not claim this is the cause of the strikes: it is a framework of reading, which helps explain why vulnerability is so great.

Amilcar Cabral wrote that national liberation means freeing the nation's productive forces from all foreign domination (our translation, after La Arme de la théorie, in the spirit of the passage). Yet a war that destroys power stations and lines does exactly the opposite: it destroys the productive forces and leaves the country more dependent on foreign aid, fuel imports and generous donors. Every drone that brings down a substation pushes back, all the more, the idea of development controlled by Sudanese themselves.

One hears, here and there, that this war belongs to two generals and their sponsors. External alliances and the battle for resources doubtless weigh, but the dispatch says nothing about them, and we will not pronounce without evidence. What is certain is that the bill is local: families in the dark, health workers operating by lamplight. This is what any diplomacy that claims to be concerned should be measuring.