Looted safes, lack of leadership and inaccessible accounts due to the lack of internet and electricity: after a month of war, Sudan’s banking system, which was barely nascent, has stopped.
On the ground, Ibrahim Said sat, trying to cover his head in the intense heat of the sun, which exceeded forty degrees, in front of the Bank of Khartoum branch in Madani, where hundreds of families are fleeing the ongoing fighting in the Sudanese capital. now living.
“I came from seven in the morning, and now it’s noon in the hope of withdrawing piastres from my account,” Said said.
Near it, dozens of men and women crowded under the scorching sun, while several policemen tried to organize them in front of the branch of the largest Sudanese bank.
“Sometimes the bank opens its doors after three in the afternoon and they let a very limited number of people through, and if you are not lucky, you come the next day, and I have been coming here for three days,” Ishrakat ar-Raikh. said.
“We have fled the fighting and we have no other way to get money except from our bank account,” she added.
Ahmed Abdel Aziz, 45, is an employee of the Omdurman National Bank. The man stood in front of the bank branch in Madani, although its doors were closed, and said: “We are confused about our situation, because our money is in banks and we cannot receive it.”
Clashes that have killed thousands and forced two million to flee their homes have brought remittances to a halt. Thus, bank employees can only issue a small amount of cash to a limited number of customers.
The Federation of Sudanese Bankers said in a statement released a few days ago that bank leaders are aiming to “restore banking services in Khartoum state if conditions are favorable to do so.”
A number of bank branches in the capital, Khartoum, were ransacked after militants forced their locks.
Mohamed Abdel Aziz, banking expert, explained the current situation. “The servers (computer systems) of the banks that control their operations are concentrated at the main headquarters in Khartoum,” he told AFP, explaining that “staff cannot access and manage them because of the fighting.”
He added: “In addition, the branches in the states have lost contact with the bank branches that give them permission to operate.”
“We cannot transfer money from one account to another, and clearing between banks has completely stopped,” said a Sudanese French bank official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak.
Abdel Aziz explained that Sudanese banks “have completely lost contact with foreign banks since the beginning of the war, and the current situation is leading to a recession in the economy, exacerbating the suffering of citizens.”
Despite this pause, the army commander and de facto ruler of Sudan after the 2021 coup, Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, decided to change the governor of the Central Bank and announced the freezing of all bank accounts of the Rapid Support Group. The force was led by his adversary Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo.
However, experts question the expediency of these decisions if the state failed to pay salaries to workers and pensioners at the end of April.
Twenty years of a strict embargo was enough to make Sudan’s banking system practically dilapidated, knowing that the country is still on the list of donor countries as one of the “heavily indebted poor countries.”
Sudan’s banking system does not allow bank card payments or international transfers between individuals.
“astronomical sums”
There are a total of 37 banks in Sudan, according to the International Monetary Fund, including four state-owned banks that control 14% of banking assets and seven foreign banks that own 23% of banking assets in the country.
At the end of 2019, these total assets were equivalent to $11.8 billion and the International Monetary Fund considered Sudan’s banking system to be “fragile” with many banks having capital below the recognized minimum.
No one knows what is left of these sums. Every day, new photos of safes are published on the Internet, the contents of which have been stolen and banks have been looted.
From the first week of fighting, the army accused the RSF of “stealing astronomical sums” from an agency linked to the Central Bank in Khartoum.
However, the Federation of Banks does not stop issuing statements in which “customers certify that their deposits are safe and sound” and confirm that “their balance sheets and financial information are fully preserved.”
