Despite the intensification of fighting; However, what is strange is the decrease in the phenomenon of long queues in front of bakeries and grocery stores, which were the general theater in the outlying districts of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, during the first days after the outbreak. of the war in mid-April.
According to Ahmed, who is employed in the public sector; Everyone has started to feel the brunt of the crisis in light of the failure to pay wages and the suspension of over 80% of private sector businesses.
Ahmed told Sky News Arabia: “Most of the employees are cash-strapped. The monthly salary was barely enough for two weeks, but after the salaries were delayed for more than 15 days, the situation got worse. .” Emphasizing that the population is trying to adapt to current conditions through austerity in everything, cutting back on meals and relying on relatively cheap ingredients.
Ahmed accuses traders of taking advantage of current security conditions and raising prices at rates beyond the capacity of citizens in a country where the poverty rate among the 40 million people reached more than 60 percent before the war. But Al-Tayeb, who runs a grocery store south of Khartoum, denies it. He told Sky News Arabia that the suspension of factories and distribution networks is the reason for the current situation.
More than 400 establishments operating in the field of food industries and various other fields in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, have been completely decommissioned after the great destruction they have suffered due to the chaos accompanying the current fighting.
Hundreds of thieves are deployed in the industrial zones of the three cities of the capital and loot everything, including machines and their parts, raw materials and productive stock.
According to Abd al-Rahman Abbas, the former secretary general of the Federation of Chambers of Industry, the extent of the destruction to which factories were exposed was unimaginable to anyone. “Many businessmen lost giant factories that took decades to build and huge sums of money were spent on them,” he told Sky News Arabia.
“The crisis is huge and will completely hamper industrial production, which will pose a threat to food and medicine supplies in the short term and lead to a significant drop in economic output,” he added.
Abbas says the current destruction of factories will have dire consequences as thousands of families will lose their livelihoods as Khartoum’s industrial sector and its associated supply chains house more than 100,000 jobs.
Hassan Bashir, an economics professor at Sudanese universities, told Sky News Arabia that the current war has complicated the crisis in Sudan’s economy, which was already suffering from serious structural problems.
He explained that repairing the vandalism suffered by commercial and industrial establishments in Khartoum takes many years, especially in light of expectations that the banking sector will not be able to play its required role in the rehabilitation, due to the weakness from which he suffers in the early stages. place, and is also affected by current looting and vandalism.
As fighting continues and supply chains are destroyed, fears are growing of severe food shortages and a further rise in prices. On the other hand; Many Sudanese dependent on remittances from relatives working abroad are suffering from the closure of banks and foreign exchange offices, and the complete cessation of external transfers.
All these conditions are pushing more and more inhabitants of the capital, Khartoum, who number around 10 million, to migrate to neighboring regions or countries under extremely complex humanitarian conditions. Amid fears the crisis could deepen further in regions that suffer from limited resources and poor accommodation infrastructure.
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