{"id":51874,"date":"2025-07-24T21:02:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T18:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=51874"},"modified":"2025-07-24T21:02:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T18:02:18","slug":"the-pastures-of-corruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/24\/the-pastures-of-corruption\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pastures of Corruption..!"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Al-Tahir Satti<\/strong><\/p>\n

They once asked a man the name of his horse. The horse had no name, so the man paused, thought deeply, then went to the stable and gouged out one of its eyes. He returned proudly and answered: “Its name is One-Eyed.”<\/p>\n

This, almost exactly, is the state of the Prime Minister\u2019s office when it issues what it called a \u201cdecision\u201d to subject public sector companies\u2014those in which the government holds shares\u2014to the supervision of the Ministry of Finance, both financially and administratively, and to establish a new unit within the ministry to be responsible for such oversight.<\/p>\n

There is no meaning or real benefit to either the decision or the new unit\u2014unless the intent is mere self-praise and appearance.<\/p>\n

In truth, this country has long had laws, regulations, and mechanisms designed to bring public sector companies under government oversight. But unfortunately, those laws and regulations are frozen and paralyzed. Instead of issuing flashy decisions like \u201cI decided\u201d\u2014as if to say \u201cI exist\u201d\u2014the better course would have been to activate and enforce these existing mechanisms. Proving one\u2019s presence is fine, but it should be through real action, not symbolic directives and empty decrees.<\/p>\n

In any case, there is already a legal clause requiring that any company in which the public owns at least 20% of the shares must have its accounts audited by the National Audit Chamber.<\/p>\n

So, the better path is to enforce the law and bring these companies under proper audit and accountability. That means reviving the Audit Chamber, which effectively died on December 19, 2019. Yes, the authority and relevance of the Audit Chamber have faded; its reports disappeared from public view from the time of the \u201ccatastrophe\u201d (2019) until today. Even the so-called \u201cPath Correction\u201d process did not include restoring the role of the Audit Chamber. If any reports exist, they are hidden away in military drawers or in the hands of political activists from that period.<\/p>\n

In contrast, during the so-called \u201cformer regime,\u201d October of every year was when the Audit Chamber\u2019s reports were publicly presented\u2014through Parliament and the media.<\/p>\n

So, the Audit Chamber must be revived to audit government-owned or government-participating companies. After reviewing them, the state should move to eliminate these holdings altogether. Most of what is called \u201cgovernment companies\u201d are hotbeds of corruption, not sources of revenue for the national treasury. They\u2019re nothing but private fiefdoms where a few roam freely without oversight or accountability.<\/p>\n

Since the time of al-Bashir, successive decisions were made to dismantle them, but they were never implemented. Every year, al-Bashir issued one or more decisions to liquidate these dens of corruption\u2014and nothing ever happened.<\/p>\n

During Hamdok\u2019s era, Mohammed Al-Ghali, head of the committee tasked with reviewing and auditing government companies, announced that the government intended to dissolve 105 out of 431 companies because they weren\u2019t contributing profits to the national treasury. He explicitly said: \u201c80% of government companies do not support the public budget.\u201d Yet, this threat was never followed through.<\/p>\n

This is the state of companies affiliated with civilian government institutions: their capital sources are unknown, as are their profits. When Hamdok and his forty activists failed to understand or dismantle these companies, rather than admit defeat, they deflected public attention to the military-owned companies.<\/p>\n

Yes, they kept the public focused on military companies while the civilian companies\u2014under their very feet\u2014remained financially opaque and mysterious in function. Their interest in military companies had nothing to do with reform or economic development, as they claimed. Rather, it was to destroy them, just as they had done with Meeco Poultry and hundreds of other companies, factories, and projects they seized\u2014to loot, extort, and ruin.<\/p>\n

Meeco Poultry, for example, produced 65% of Khartoum\u2019s poultry consumption before it was confiscated by the shadowy committee member Babiker Faisal, who handed it over to the opportunist Salah Manaa, who then appointed his brother-in-law Sami Bella as director. By the time they fled after October 25, the company\u2019s production had dropped to below 10%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Al-Tahir Satti They once asked a man the name of his horse. The horse had no name, so the man paused, thought deeply, then went to the stable and gouged out one of its eyes. He returned proudly and answered: “Its name is One-Eyed.” This, almost exactly, is the state of the Prime Minister\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51874"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51875,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51874\/revisions\/51875"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}