Students Protest Austerity in Sudan

Though we’ve noted that austerity is a global phenomenon, coverage on this blog has focused on resistance in global capitalism’s core. Thoroughly ignored, events in Sudan show what’s wrong with this tendency.

Thousands of students have been protesting a struggling economy and a new proposed austerity program in the capital Khartoum there. The ruling National Congress Party, led by Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, has governed on the basis of support from the military and Islamists forces for almost 23 years, since siezing power in a military coup. Though they’re mostly known in the West for commiting war crimes during the Darfur conflict, including support for brutal Arab militias like the Janjaweed, they’ve melded this despotism with a neoliberal economic model that’s in-step with their erstwhile Western enemies.

Civil war in the country resulted in the creation of South Sudan a year ago. Without South Sudan’s rich oil fields, three times Sudan’s output, the Al-Bashir government has been struggling to find substitute sources for revenue and hard currency. So far there have been no answers. The budget deficit continues to rise and the price of food stuffs and other vital goods are soaring.

The only answer the government has is cuts and new taxes, most of them aimed at the country’s poor and working class majority.

Protests proliferated around the country in February, but they didn’t reemerge until last week when thousands of university students marched in Khartoum, in addition to Al-Obayid and other major towns, for seven consecutive days to protest the government’s program. Dozens were arrested.

But despite Al-Bashir’s bloody past and the ​“exotic” backdrop, it’s key to note how similar the protests are to fights elsewhere. The Sudanese government isn’t doing anything especially draconian, they’re merely following a neoliberal agenda pioneered and implemented elsewhere: public service redundancies, new taxes on consumption, and cuts to social services – it might as well be Greece. Or Greece might as well be Sudan.