What are the Roots of Underdevelopment and Deterioration in Sudan After Independence? (1/2)

By: Taj Al-Sir Othman. More than 70 years have passed since Sudan’s independence. Reflecting on the post-independence years, the question arises: Why has the country reached this level of underdevelopment and decay? What is the horizon for the country's development in various economic, social, and cultural fields? Is underdevelopment an inescapable fate? Many writers, economists, and social researchers have provided different explanations for the phenomenon of underdevelopment in Third World or underdeveloped countries. They described symptoms and indicators, including but not limited to: - Increasing birth and death rates. - Low income levels, shortage of savings and capital, rampant diseases, illiteracy, malnutrition, weak productivity, and technological backwardness. - Duality and sectoral fragmentation in society: a "modern sector in a sea of traditional sector." - Temporal lag: Rostow’s theory of stages of growth: traditional society, transitional stage, takeoff, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption. - The vicious circle: "A country is poor because it is poor." - Inertia such as: backward values and customs, lack of initiative, the spread of individualism, and the structure of a pastoral mentality that prevents the acquisition of modernity. - Absence of a national project or a national state. In my estimation, these explanations point to manifestations of underdevelopment, for which many statistical indicators can be provided, as done by global capitalist economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. However, they do not provide an explanation for the phenomenon of underdevelopment; rather, they cloud the vision and hide the fundamental goals of capitalist states, which can be summarized as: - Plundering the wealth of underdeveloped countries through unequal exchange and deepening poverty and class disparity in those countries. - Undermining and dismantling national systems that build development independent of the orbit of the global capitalist system, as happened in the former Soviet Union. - Smuggling the economic surplus necessary for development abroad. - Privatization, selling off public sector institutions, devaluing and floating the national currency, and withdrawing subsidies from basic commodities, education, and health. - Preventing the achievement of independent, self-reliant, and inward-looking development. These are among the prescriptions that the Salvation regime followed with great fervor since 1989, and the result was the economic, social, and cultural ruin and destruction that we are living through now. Therefore, it is necessary to penetrate the economic, social, and cultural roots of underdevelopment. What are those roots and features? First: Qualitative features of underdevelopment. The features of economic underdevelopment in Sudan can be identified as follows: A - External orientation and unequal exchange relations with developed capitalist countries, represented by: - Economic dependence on developed capitalist countries. - Systematic depletion of income by foreign capital and the export of economic surplus abroad, and income losses arising from external relations with the capitalist world. B - The internal side, related to structural features (stagnation of energies, political instability, civil wars, and the inflation of the security, defense, and state apparatus budget, which consumes more than 80% of the budget), summarized as follows: - A fragmented economy that lacks organic unity and integration, characterized by an open nature and a distorted composition of its branches. - A heterogeneous society with a dual structure (a modern sector and a traditional one), which became more deteriorated after the destruction of agricultural, livestock, industrial, and service production, and the dominance of parasitic activity (currency trading, money laundering, human trafficking, drug trafficking, etc.). In other words, negative results arose from adopting traditional Western capitalist development thought, which led to the following: foreign debt, technological dependence, food deficits or famines, civil wars, internal instability, failed models of industrialization, failure to achieve desired direct goals, negative effects of inflating the role of investment in development, lack of self-confidence, and increased reliance on others. To be continued. alsirbabo@yahoo.co.uk