Sudan: factories struggle to reopen, workers jobless and prices soaring

According to Al Jazeera, Sudanese factories are struggling to restart after the devastating losses caused by the war. The outlet reports that workers are left without jobs and that consumers are paying more for everyday goods. The wire summary is thin: we have here neither the number of factories affected, nor unemployment figures, nor any detail on responsibility for the destruction. We will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us start with what is visible: a factory at a standstill means wages that vanish, families skipping meals and, on the shelves, goods that now have to be sourced elsewhere. When local production collapses, the price does not fall from the sky: it reflects imports, transport and risk. The Sudanese consumer pays for the war twice, once through lost income and once at the till.

Here the structural question opens. Dependency economists explain that poor countries are not simply "behind": their economies were shaped to supply raw materials, cheap labour and outlets to the centre. A manufacturing base, even a modest one, is precisely what allows a country to escape that role. Destroying it closes the door. Every textile, food-processing or transformation plant that goes dark pushes the country a little further back towards exporting raw products and importing finished ones. We are not saying that this was anyone's aim; we are saying that the effect is structural.

Reconstruction will then pose a classic problem. Who will finance the restart? If it is through debt and conditional loans, the country risks repaying by sacrificing what it is trying to rebuild: public services, workers' protections, sovereignty over its industrial choices. Kwame Nkrumah already observed in Neo-Colonialism that large financial consortiums move into African economies, including in wartime, to entrench themselves "whatever happens": a paraphrase on our part, but the warning holds for any period of chaos in which assets are sold off cheaply.

Amilcar Cabral, for his part, reminded us that national liberation requires a profound transformation of the nation's productive forces. In other words, a country is not sovereign because it has a flag, but because it decides what it produces, for whom and on what terms. This is the blind spot of many discussions of "recovery": we talk about restarting machines, and rarely about who those machines will end up working for.

What we still do not know is who owns these factories, who will be ready to finance them and on what conditions. Yet it is these answers, far more than the timetable of reopenings, that will show whether Sudanese workers regain jobs or merely a role in someone else's economy.