Weekly Press Columns Digest
22 March, 2020
KHARTOUM (Sudanow)—In a column that appeared on Al-Sudani Aldauliyyah of Sunday, Omar al-Tayeb al-Amin attributed the series of economic crises in Sudan to what he called "a crisis of ethics and conscience."
He said, while the series of crises give birth to each other, some Sudanese merchants, out of the crisis of ethics and conscience, for instance buy sugar and store it to sell three months later for triple the buying price and buy a sack of onions for 400 pounds and keep it away to sell for two million pounds during the month of Ramadan.
Upon hearing about the eruption of Coronavirus in China, hundreds of Sudanese, in anticipation of its occurrence in Sudan, bought and hoarded big quantities of masks for making wealth, said Amin.
He added that when it was announced that a man has recently died of Corona in Khartoum, the stored masks surfaced to be sold for as high as 50 pounds and more (it is sold at 2-3 pounds before) to make use of the rush; sometimes it can be available only in the black market.
"We criticize the government for the crises we create,' said the columnist, adding: "We wish things would get better and the profiteers would disappear."
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Renowned columnist Gaafer Abbas has agreed that the country presently experiences living hardships, a scarcity in the basic commodities and a spiral decline in the Sudan's local currency but he noted that this was the heritage of the corrupt regime that undermined everything but filled the pockets of its associates.
In a column carried by Altahrir online newspaper of Monday, Abbas wrote that the Transitional Government has inherited empty treasuries and a deteriorated state's organ while all the economic resources are still in the hands of opportunists and parasites that conspire against the country and its people and will take at least five years, not only five months, to cleanse the dirt left over by the extinct regime.
But the good thing is that the kleptocracy era has been terminated and it will take time for the present government to retrieve from foreign banks 100 billion dollars stolen by the kleptocrats of the toppled regime, Abbas wrote.
He persuaded the Sudanese people to be optimistic and consider the good achievements by the government, including tens of trillion-worth luxury houses built by the thieves of the former regime on the grounds of the Sports City, hundreds of two—trillion-worth residential plots and houses possessed by brothers and other members of the family of ousted President Omar al-Beshir, textbooks to be provided for each student, something that was not in practice for three decades and control of cholera by the Minister of Health.
While pointing out other achievements by the government, including raising the low limit of wages for government employees from about 400 to 3,000 pounds a month, Abbas dwelt at length on the heavy burden left over by the Islamist regime, including more than 60 billion dollars in external debts and millions of dollars of damages to be paid by the government for demolition of the US Cole destroyer and the US embassies by elements of the overthrown regime.
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Unlike countries of efficient control and health systems, such as China and European nations, the Sudan will be in a miserable situation if Corona virus spread on a wide scale, something which is likely to happen in view of the country's geographic position, neighboring a number of countries infected with the virus, besides the existence of Sudanese who exploit the crises for their own ends, wrote Asma'a Juma'ah in a column published by Altayyar daily newspaper of Tuesday.
The columnist, for this reason, called for cooperation by the people with the government for fighting the pandemic Covid-19 which the Transitional Government cannot confront by itself.
She said the difficulties the government faces include those created by "crises-mongers" who exploit such situations for personal gains, even if this practice poses death risks to any person, including kinfolks.
The government has to curb such practices as raising by merchants of the prices of lemon and other fruits which contain vitamin C, soap and other detergents and it has to check monopoly of the masks which have become either unavailable or of high prices, said Asma'a.
She said counter-revolution elements also exploit the situation by spreading news and false reports on the social media for the purpose of creating panic among the people and calling for anti-government demonstrations, although those malicious persons know that gatherings lead to the spread of this virus.
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Columnist Bekry al-Medani, writing on Al-Sudani daily newspaper of Wednesday, described as puzzling a repeated delay of announcing the results of investigation into the dispersal of the sit-in protest beside the Armed Forces Command Headquarters on June 3rd.
He said the delay, that was protested by the youth of the December Revolutionaries, is puzzling because the authorities, the Sudanese police, concerned with revealing crimes are highly qualified and have previously uncovered more ambiguous crimes than the dispersal of the sit-in the perpetrators of which, according to the columnist, are well-known.
The dispersal was not committed behind closed doors away from the eyes of the public or from the cameras of the armed forces general command or those of the nearly institutions, said Medani, adding that tens of eyewitnesses have voluntarily come forward to give testimonies to the committee of enquiry that is headed by Advocate Nabil Adeeb.
The delay that was announced by Adeeb will provide the culprits with a chance to hide or escape and therefore it will be difficult to get hold of them, the columnist said, calling for speeding up the investigation by the committee of Adeeb who Medani described as having a renowned history that places him beyond suspicion.
He also called upon the Prime Minister to urge the committee to act faster and to provide it with any facilities that assist it in carrying out its mission.
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The editor-in chief of Alyoum Altali daily newspaper, Muzamil Abul Gassim, has bitterly criticized the President of the Sudanese Football Federation (SFF) for defying the government and Coronavirus by insisting on continuance of the football league matches all over the country before a delayed intervention by the Minister of Youth and Sports banning the organization of those matches.
Writing in his newspaper of Thursday, Gassim has branded the SFF as a body of corruption and its president as an official of the dissolved formerly ruling National Congress Party (NCP).
The SFF and its chairman were part of the defunct regime that should have been disbanded long ago, said the columnist, citing as inconsiderate and reckless the defiance by the SFF President and as an anti-government act that should be checked.
He accused the SFF head of financial corruption, illegally using millions of dollars for personal and family purposes.
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