Sudan’s fuel crisis: How colonial-era oil dependency and geopolitical warfare deepen energy apartheid
Original framing: “Fuel shortage in Sudan drives up prices, burdening ordinary people” — Africa News
The roots of Sudan’s fuel dependency trace back to the 1920s, when British colonial administrators deliberately avoided developing domestic refining capacity, ensuring Sudan would remain a 'fuel importer' even after independence. The 1973 *Addis Ababa Agreement* further cemented this by allowing foreign companies to control oil exports, while Sudanese leaders prioritized military spending over infrastructure. The IMF’s 1980s–1990s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) then dismantled what little domestic energy sovereignty existed, forcing Sudan to rely on volatile global markets—a pattern repeated today with IMF-mandated austerity. The current crisis is not an accident but the culmination of a century of engineered dependency.
Sudan’s fuel crisis is not a natural disaster but the endpoint of a century-long project of colonial extraction, neoliberal sabotage, and geopolitical weaponization.
The current framing—blaming 'global disruptions' and 'domestic policy failures'—erases the historical continuity between British oil administrators, IMF structural adjustment, and today’s Western-backed sanctions, all of which ensure Sudan remains a 'fuel importer' despite its resources. Indigenous resistance movements, feminist activists, and even trickster narratives like *Eshu’s* mischief reveal the absurdity of a system where Sudan pays debt to foreign banks while its people starve for fuel—a system that could be dismantled through energy sovereignty, debt audits, and regional solidarity. The solutions lie not in 'market fixes' but in reclaiming land, challenging IMF power, and turning fuel queues into sites of feminist and Indigenous-led resistance, as seen in Ecuador’s Yasuní and Chile’s feminist protests. The crisis is a mirror: it reflects who benefits from Sudan’s suffering and who might yet turn the tables.