Sudan: drones target the power grid, civilians pay the bill

According to Al Jazeera, new drone attacks have hit Sudan's electricity system, extending a campaign that is disrupting the power supply. The channel also reports that the army claims new fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have defected. The summary we have does not say who launched these strikes, which localities are affected, or how many people are without power. We will not invent it. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

A power plant or a transformer is not a target like any other. Cutting the current means stopping water pumps, vaccine cold rooms, operating theatres, and the phones people use to warn their families. In a country where war has already driven so many onto the roads, a blackout is a weapon that strikes first those who have neither a generator nor the fuel to buy one. The military headquarters, for their part, always have a way to keep the lights on.

In foreign capitals, the temptation is to tell this war as a duel between generals. That is convenient: it spares us from looking at what is going on around it. We cannot, for lack of material in this dispatch, document the external backers of either side. But the structural question deserves to be asked: who benefits from a country whose infrastructure is collapsing? A state deprived of its grid, its refineries and its administrations negotiates from a position of weakness, and extractive economies love weak states. When public authority retreats, resources are sold through parallel channels, far from budgets and from scrutiny.

This is the mechanism described by dependency theory: economies shaped to supply raw materials and labour to the centre, rather than to feed and light their own populations. Sudan is not "backward"; it was organised to export. And the anti-colonial thinkers, Cabral and Fanon foremost among them, warned us: a national liberation without social transformation leaves a local elite to seize the apparatus inherited from colonisation. That two armed forces emerging from the same system are now fighting over what remains of it is, sadly, no surprise at all.

The defections announced by the army should be treated with caution: it is a statement from one of the belligerents, in a war where information is also a battlefield. They may reflect fighters' exhaustion, or they may be propaganda. Neither hypothesis lights a single bulb in a hospital.

What to watch: who is responsible for the strikes, the extent of the outages, and the attention the "international community" will pay to a war whose victims barely register on the markets. As long as Sudan is seen as a deposit to be mined and a playing field, its people will remain in the dark, in the literal sense. We will return to this as soon as the facts are better established.