When Prices Outpace Salaries and Hardship Grinds People Down: What Can Ordinary Citizens Do?

Nu’man Yousif Mohamed

The high cost of living in Sudan is no longer merely a passing economic crisis, nor are increases in the prices of essential commodities and fuel simply news items that people hear and then forget. Rising prices have become a daily battle for survival, one fought by ordinary citizens in an unequal struggle between limited incomes, prices that soar uncontrollably, and fixed salaries that fail to keep pace with anything. Indeed, some salaries do not even reach their recipients regularly.

The question that inevitably arises today, without evasion or sugarcoating, is this: What can ordinary citizens do when the prices of their basic necessities rise by the hour, while their salaries remain trapped at outdated figures and may even be delayed until whatever purchasing power they retain has further eroded?

What can an employee do when waiting until the end of the month to receive a salary, while the trader does not wait until the end of the day to change prices? What can a family do when it wakes up to one set of prices, only to return to the market in the evening and discover that the same amount of money can no longer buy what it needs? And what can a pensioner do after spending a lifetime serving the state, only to find himself, in his final years, unable to afford medicine and food, and perhaps forced to choose between the two?

Sudanese citizens are not facing rising commodity prices alone. They are confronting an interconnected chain of burdens that begins with higher fuel and transportation costs, extends to food, medicine, and service prices, and ends at the doors of schools, hospitals, and rental properties. When fuel prices rise, the cost of transporting goods and operating production facilities increases, and these increases are reflected in the prices of goods and services. When the Sudanese pound loses purchasing power, cash income becomes less capable of meeting basic needs, even if the figure printed on the payslip remains unchanged. Citizens therefore pay twice for the crisis: first through rising prices, and second through the continuous erosion of the real value of their incomes.

As for low-income employees, most have no side business to compensate for their inadequate salaries, no savings to protect them, and no ability to pass their financial burdens on to someone else. They are the weakest link in an economic chain in which they bear the heaviest burden without having any means of influencing the causes of the crisis.

It is unfair for prices to move freely whenever circumstances change, while salaries remain frozen, as though the purchasing power of money were irrelevant. Nor is it acceptable for workers and employees to remain prisoners of salaries determined under economic conditions entirely different from those they face today.

Even more painful is the fact that some workers do not know when they will receive their salaries. As a result, delayed payment becomes more than an administrative problem; it turns into a full-blown livelihood crisis. Debts accumulate, financial obligations go unmet, and breadwinners are forced to borrow money to cover basic necessities, only to repay those debts from a new salary that is already insufficient to cover the needs of the month. Thus, citizens become trapped in a vicious cycle: they borrow to survive, receive their salaries to repay their debts, and then borrow again.

The plight of pensioners is even harsher. These are people who devoted years of their lives to serving state institutions and society. Their retirement years should have been a period of relative stability and dignity. But how can that be possible when pensions are eroded by inflation, payments are delayed, and the costs of healthcare and food continue to rise at a time when pensioners’ ability to work and earn an income is declining?

Leaving pensioners to confront rising living costs with incomes that fall short of meeting their basic needs is not merely a financial failure; it is a failure to honour a social and moral obligation towards those who have served the state.

We recognize that Sudan is going through a profound economic crisis, that the war has inflicted severe damage on the economy, production, and infrastructure, and that declining output, disrupted supply chains, exchange-rate instability, and financing constraints are all factors putting upward pressure on prices. However, acknowledging the severity of the crisis does not absolve officials of their responsibilities, just as explaining the causes of rising prices does not replace the need to take measures to alleviate their impact.

Citizens are not waiting for speeches about the difficulty of prevailing circumstances, nor are they satisfied with statements promising that conditions will improve in the future. They want to know what the government will do today to protect their ability to buy bread, flour, cooking oil, medicine, and fuel, and what it will do tomorrow to prevent them from facing yet another wave of price increases.

The state’s responsibility is not limited to managing revenues and expenditures. It also includes protecting the minimum requirements for a decent life, monitoring markets and preventing monopolies and price manipulation, providing information about prices, ensuring that essential commodities reach citizens, and working to stabilize production and supply.

Nor should price liberalization, wherever it is introduced, become a means of abandoning citizens to fend for themselves without any social protection. The circumstances of war must not become an open-ended justification for shifting the entire burden of the crisis onto low-income groups.

What we need is not general promises, but urgent and clearly defined measures, including the following:

First: Ensuring the regular payment of salaries and pensions.

Income that does not arrive on time loses part of its economic function and compounds the hardship of its recipients. A clear priority must be established to secure the necessary funding for regular payments.

Second: Reviewing wages and pensions on the basis of purchasing power.

What is needed is not merely a numerical increase that rising prices may swallow within days, but a wage and pension policy based on actual living costs, with periodic reviews that take inflation rates and available financial resources into account.

Third: Protecting essential commodities.

This requires strengthening supply, encouraging domestic production, reducing bottlenecks in transportation and distribution, combating monopolies and exploitative practices, and publishing clear indicative prices to help citizens identify fair market prices.

Fourth: Directing support to those who genuinely need it.

The poorest families, low-income workers, pensioners, internally displaced persons, and those affected by the war need practical social protection that reaches them regularly, not merely announced programmes whose benefits are difficult for those in need to access.

Fifth: Transparency and openness.

People have the right to know the reasons behind price increases, the cost components of essential commodities, the measures being taken by the relevant authorities, and the results actually achieved. Trust is not built through slogans, but through accurate information and tangible action.

Ordinary citizens are not asking for the impossible. They want an income that preserves their dignity, a market that does not surprise them with another price increase every morning, medicine they can afford, a meal that provides their children with the minimum nutritional requirements, a pension that arrives on time, and a future in which they are not constantly haunted by the fear of being unable to meet even their most basic needs.

People cannot be asked to remain patient indefinitely, nor can they be expected to shoulder enormous national burdens while their ability to provide life’s necessities continues to shrink. Patience is no substitute for sound policies, endurance does not absolve officials of responsibility, and adapting to a crisis does not mean accepting poverty and deprivation as permanent realities.

Even more dangerous than rising prices is the possibility that society may become accustomed to being unable to confront them. The question of securing today’s meal may become more important than thinking about children’s education, medical treatment, or the future. Family life may be reduced to daily calculations of survival, leaving no room for planning or hope.

The dignity of citizens is not a secondary item in the national budget, nor is it a privilege that favourable circumstances grant and crises take away. It is the foundation of the relationship between the state and society and one of the most important measures of the success of public policies.

The real question is not simply: Why have prices risen? It is: Why does protection for citizens against the effects of these increases remain absent or inadequate?

If the state is facing exceptional circumstances, it has a duty to establish exceptional priorities as well, beginning with those who have no means of protecting themselves: low-income earners, workers, employees, pensioners, and families exhausted by war, displacement, and poverty. There is no meaning in talking about economic recovery if citizens cannot afford their basic necessities, and no value in positive financial indicators if they do not translate into tangible improvements in people’s lives.

Ultimately, the success of the state is not measured by the revenues it collects or the decisions it issues, but by its ability to make the lives of its citizens less harsh, preserve their dignity, and ensure that they are not left alone to confront a merciless market with an inadequate income.

One question must remain on the table of every official: If citizens cannot live on their salaries, cannot do without them, and cannot even be certain when they will be paid, what remains of their economic and social security?

What can ordinary citizens do? And who will listen to their voices before the inability to make ends meet turns into an inability to hope?