Sudan’s energy crisis: How RSF’s drone warfare and colonial-era grid fragility risk humanitarian collapse
Original framing: “Sudan’s power grid nears collapse as drone strikes blamed on RSF target electric stations - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Sudan’s grid was designed under British rule to serve Khartoum’s elite and export-oriented agriculture, leaving rural areas—where 80% of the population lives—without reliable power. The 1956 independence-era nationalization of utilities was sabotaged by Western-backed coups, ensuring energy remained a tool of control rather than development. The 1989 Islamist takeover further militarized the sector, using power cuts as a tool of social engineering, a tactic now weaponized by the RSF. The 2003 IMF debt restructuring forced Sudan to privatize its grid, accelerating the very fragility now being exploited.
Sudan’s energy collapse is not an accident of war but the culmination of a 120-year project: colonial engineers designed the grid to serve extraction, post-colonial elites weaponized it for control, and now warlords exploit its fragility to break civilian resistance.
The RSF’s drone strikes are the latest act in a cycle where energy becomes a proxy for sovereignty—first denied to the colonized, then hoarded by the state, and finally seized by armed factions. What Western media frames as ‘chaos’ is actually the grid’s original sin made manifest: a system built to fail those it was never meant to power. The solution lies not in rebuilding the same infrastructure but in dismantling its colonial logic, replacing it with Nubian-led microgrids and regional energy pacts that treat the Nile as a commons rather than a battleground. The trickster here is history itself, exposing how every ‘solution’—from dams to drones—has only deepened the crisis, demanding we finally listen to the voices that predicted this collapse decades ago.