Have you Heard about the Quest of Jibriel ?!

As I See 

By: Adil El-Baz

In the rush of preoccupation with war work and the army’s victories, the press conference held by the Minister of Finance – despite its importance – passed unnoticed, and no one reviewed it, and here is the major crisis because the war is not only taking place in the alleys of the cities and the battlefields between “attack and kill”… but its real field is Economy. Those who follow the course of the war and its economics realize that a real war is taking place in the economic spheres, and there are economic statesmen who are true warriors, and there are great economists whose names will be written in letters of light by history, and we pray God that they be recorded by God with the truthful and martyrs.
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H.E. Finance Minister Jibriel said in the aforementioned press conference that the year’s budget is a war budget that will be reviewed every three months, and he announced a decrease in revenues by (80%). The Minister of Finance is facing such an unprecedented situation, as no Finance Minister in the modern history of Sudan has faced what is faced by H.E. Gabriel now. I do not believe that any African economy has faced what we are facing now: massive war expenses on a daily basis with a comprehensive collapse in revenues. How did H.E Gabriel face this ordeal? How does the state’s wheel turn now despite its weakness and the cessation of any other expenditures other than spending on the war?
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H.E Jibriel and the entire state put all their resources to spend on one item, which is the item on spending on war, and there is no voice or spending that is superior to spending on the battle. It was not originally possible to spend it on any other aspects. The only resource for spending was gold. Almost 90% of the state’s income now comes from gold revenues and the rest from customs revenues in light of the cessation of the commercial and industrial sector and the decline of customs revenues. The cessation of communications sector revenues came after the militia’s occupation of the divisions of companies that are considered an important source of revenue. The only source of gold is that he must run the state at its lowest levels of expenditure, and he must also cover the costs of war, including weapons, supplies, and salaries for the soldiers, and spend on everything needed to operate the war machine.
The other policy adopted by the Minister of Finance is to hold the states responsible for managing their economic affairs away from supporting the state, which does not even have money to support it. Therefore, we see that many states have recently been active in maximizing their revenues and reducing their expenses, and some of them have even contributed to supporting mobilization campaigns, and here it is necessary. It is worth noting that popular support for the war effort greatly reduced the Ministry of Finance’s burden on war expenses. Much of the construction of the army camps in the capital and the provinces was financed by businessmen, ordinary people, and tribes, who handled most of the spending on the army camps and the teams stationed near them.
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The third path that Jibriel took was to mobilize the private sector to contribute to the war effort. Many businessmen came forward by providing direct in-kind financial support amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, others contributed to creating foreign bank facilities, and others contributed by importing petroleum products with long payment terms.
In the same conference in which the Minister of Finance revealed that the militia had stolen a ton and 700 kilos of gold from the gold refinery in Khartoum, he revealed the ministry’s efforts aimed at conducting a geological survey carried out by Germany to determine the country’s mineral reserves, especially uranium, so that the Sudanese can obtain loans accordingly. This is a good trend to continue the increasing expenditure on the war effort in the absence of any external support from any party, and in light of the continuation of the war with no horizon of solution or military resolution. The same idea can be applied to mortgage gold production or sell high-yield blocks.
We now need many creative ideas that can help the Minister of Finance in the battle of the economic war, which he has so far managed with great efficiency.