Sudan’s history since independence in 1956 captures the calamities of postcolonies navigating an unequal global fiscal order. Historian and researcher Dr. Harry Cross tells in Undoing a Revolution: Sudan and the Politics of Debt the compelling story of Sudan’s persistent sovereign debt crises and blames the cause on actors outside Sudan—western creditors, punitive sanctions, and unequal global economic arrangements. Published on April 30, 2025, in the Debating Ideas series produced by the International African Institute and hosted by SOAS University of London, the book leads the way in radical accounting of how Sudan’s economic crisis has fueled political instability, including the civil war in 2023. Drawing on research by Cross, though, this piece investigates Sudan’s debt history, the consequences of structural adjustment, and wider implications for postcolonies with in-depth analysis presented in particular for Diplotic readers.
The Rise and Fall of Sudan’s Borrowing Binge
Sudan’s debt drama began during Jaafar Nimeiri (1969–1985), who had brought the country into the fold of coveted Western partners in the Arab world and Horn of Africa. As reward for having stood firm against the Marxist government in Ethiopia since 1974 and having upheld the diplomatic ties with Egypt during Camp David in 1978, Sudan was showered with U.S. aid and bountiful credit lines by Wall Street banks. This geopolitical configuration and easy-crediting environment created by skyrocketing commodity prices in the early 1970s allowed Sudan to borrow extravagantly. Sudan’s debt to GDP was the world’s largest in the early part of the 1980s, illustrating its run-away foreign lending.
But the global economy veered sharply. The 1973 oil shock inflated Sudan’s energy import bill, and the Volcker Shock of 1979, in which the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates, made new lending prohibitively costly. These shocks triggered the Third World Debt Crisis, and it swamped Sudan and the postcolonials of Africa, Asia, and Latin America with debt. Sudan by 1978 was not even able to afford interest and its lenders in turn bullied Nimeiri into taking emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Devastating Impact of Structural Adjustment
The IMF rescue came with the heavy price of a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) that insisted on strict reforms. A currency devaluation by 13% against the US dollar in 1978 completed 80 uninterrupted years of currency stability since the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1955). Accumulated devaluations under Nimeiri devalued the Sudanese Pound from $2.87 in 1978 to $0.40 in 1985. A Sudanese with £S.100,000 in 1978 owned the equivalent of $2.87 million; in 1985, it was only worth $40,000. Since that time, the currency has lost more than 90% every decade, destroying wealth and creating price uncertainty among investors, producers, and consumers.
Devaluation was only part of the SAP. Austerity, privatization, and removal of subsidies undermined the Sudanese state socialist experiment, triggering protests and strikes. Subsidy removal and real reductions in wages on commodities like fuel and bread penalized the ordinary Sudanese and created bitterness against Nimeiri’s regime. The reforms did not yield promised economic stability and export-led growth but entrenched the country in poverty and instability.
From Default to Isolation
Sudan defaulted on its World Bank and IMF loans in 1984, and, unusually, did not give priority to paying multilateral creditors. The default ended new credit and plunged Sudan into financial isolation. The U.S., no longer regarding Nimeiri as a reliable ally, ceased aid and endorsed one final round of austerity and devaluation USAID advised in 1985. Those actions were the last straw: Nimeiri was toppled from power by popular revolt in 1985, the termination of his 16-year rule.
Subsequent governments in the late 1980s promised in turn that Sudan could return to world finance by adopting IMF dictates, including devaluation by as much as 44% in 1987. The 1989 coup that installed an Islamist government under Umar al-Bashir (1989–2019) ended all that. The U.S. and particularly other Western governments initiated sanctions from 1993, citing support by the regime of militant Islamic groups. Sanctions turned Sudan from privileged borrower into international pariah, cutting off access to global capital markets and multilateral lending. The twin pressures of debt arrears and sanctions regime brought Sudan’s economy into stagnation for decades.
Debt as a Political Force
Despite Sudan’s political peaks and troughs—from Nimeiri’s nominal socialism through Sadiq al-Mahdi’s brief liberal parliamentary government (1986–1989) and Bashir’s military Islamist dictatorship—economic policy was uncharacteristically consistent. Successive regimes applied IMF counsel, applying privatization, austerity, and currency devaluation in pursuit of foreign aid and market access. These repeatedly failed to work. Instead of stimulating export-led growth, devaluation encouraged capital flight, as Sudan elites shipped assets abroad to keep pace with the falling currency. In the 2000s, the economy shifted from monopolistic trading to the unregulated smuggling economy, bypassing sanctions and domestic taxation.
The political ramifications of these policies ran deep. In 2017, Bashir’s attempt to lift fuel and bread subsidies, at IMF behest, triggered mass protests that in 2019 revolution ousted him after 30 years of rule. This upheaval ushered in a transitional government, with civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok (2019–2021), a former UN economist, sharing power with the military. Hamdok continued with the same IMF-backed policies—reducing spending, removing subsidies, and devaluing the currency—in spite of their unpopularity. While Western commentators had denounced these policies as authoritarian under Bashir, they extolled them as “bold” under Hamdok, revealing a double standard in how economic reforms are assessed.
Hamdok’s reforms failed to stabilize the economy, and in 2021 the fragile democratic transition in Sudan ended in a coup by the military. The civil war that erupted in 2023 only highlighted the volatility of the country. Cross wouldn’t call the coup and the war direct consequences of the policy of Hamdok, but he categorically puts it that Sudan’s isolation and poverty are not the direct effect of domestic mismanagement or corruption, as the West would normally assume, but are the products of structural disequilibria in the world economy and of deliberate policy in the West, in the form of sanctions that were economic warfare in all but name.
A Broadened Postcolonial Movement
Undoing a Revolution refutes the received wisdom in attributing debt crises to Third World governments and instead highlights structural causes in the global context. The Third World Debt Crisis of the 1980s was not Sudan’s sole experience, as it assaulted Third World countries all across the Global South due to global price shocks and monetary policy in the West. Sudan’s pattern of irresponsible lending during the 1970s and austerity and sanctions that followed repeats the general trends of the global monetary system that penalize the poorest countries disproportionately.
Cross’s book is an appeal to rethink the regulation of global finance. Sudan’s poverty, political turmoil, and economic marginality are not in themselves failures, but are inevitably entangled with impositions from outside. To policymakers, specialists, and activists, the book is of basic importance in revealing the structural barriers that face Sudan and, by extension, other post-colonial countries and demanding the re-organizing of global economic control in the name of justice and equality.
Conclusion
Sudan’s history of debt and economic crisis are exemplary of the challenges of the postcolonial state in the unequal world order. From the debt excess of the 1970s to the austerity demonstrations of the 1980s and 2019, the history of Sudan is representative of the destructive power of IMF reforms, sanctions from the West, and global finance regulations. As civil war and persistent economic suffering decimate Sudan, Undoing a Revolution is required reading on these challenges and what they bode for the Global South. For those who are interested in becoming part of these debates, there is scope in the Debating Ideas website and book series for activist writing and progressive scholarship. Become part of the debate by writing to us on debateideas@africanarguments.org. *Sudan, Sovereign Debt, Economic Crisis, Structural Adjustment, Sanctions, Postcolonial Politics, African Arguments
