A complementary reading of Yahya Abnaouf’s article “The Final Warning If This War Does Not Stop: Su

03:47 PM November, 01 2026

Sudanese Online
د. علي عبدالله الخليفة طه-UK
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From Warning to Structure: When It Is Not Enough for Everyone to Stand at Their Post
A complementary reading of Yahya Abnaouf’s article “The Final Warning If This War Does Not Stop: Sudan Facing the Lean Years”

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Introduction

Yahya Abnaouf has written an article whose title leaves no room for interpretation: “The Final Warning.” It is a warning we embrace without reservation. The war that has been consuming Sudan since April 2023 no longer threatens the present alone; it is confiscating the economic and social future of generations to come. In keeping with the “Complementing, Not Confronting” series, this reading does not seek to refute what the author has said. It asks the question that immediately follows any warning: once the alarm has sounded, who is able to act, with what tools, and under what guarantees؟
I. What the Author Gets Right
The article deserves credit for three essential contributions:

First, it reads the war as a compound phenomenon. It does not confine it to the battlefield but links it to the collapse of agricultural and livestock production, the erosion of purchasing power, and climatic shocks of drought and flood. This is the correct diagnosis: the war in Sudan is not merely a military event with economic consequences; it is, at its core, an economy in its own right.

Second, its philosophy of “everyone at their post.” By distributing responsibility among farmers, traders, experts, engineers and doctors, it moves the discourse of rescue away from waiting for a saviour and towards mobilising society as a whole. This spirit converges directly with what the Charter of Salvation and State-Building proposes under the heading of the Grand National Nafeer.
Third, its sense of urgency. The author is right to insist that hunger does not wait for political disputes to be settled, and that history does not forgive those who stand idle.

II. A Methodological Note: The Danger Is Present and Needs No Future Date

The article grounds its warning in the forecast of a global economic crisis beginning in 2027 and peaking in 2030, without directing the reader to the source of that forecast. In fact, the International Monetary Fund’s most recent estimates speak of global growth slowing to around 3.1% in 2026 under the pressure of energy prices: a slowdown that warrants caution, but not the collapse the article depicts. Forecasting global crises years ahead is a field full of conflicting estimates, and it is unwise to build a national message on it in the language of certainty.
The more important point, however, is that the author’s argument does not need this prophecy at all. Sudan is not standing on the threshold of the “lean years”; it is already living them. Famine was officially declared in parts of Darfur in 2024, millions of displaced people and refugees have lost their livelihoods, and agricultural seasons in the country’s most fertile regions have been disrupted one after another. Tying the warning to a future date may hand the complacent an excuse for delay (“we still have until 2027”), when the more painful truth is that time has already run out.

III. From “Everyone at Their Post” to “Who Guarantees the Posts؟”

The article’s strength lies in its distribution of roles; its gap lies in assuming that these roles can be performed within the existing structure. This is where the Charter comes in, not to confront the idea, but to give it the architecture that makes it possible.

1. The Army and Police: A Party, Not an Arbiter

The article tasks the army and police with imposing security to protect trade routes and production areas. Yet the military establishment and the forces fighting against it are today parties to the conflict, and each has direct economic interests in gold, border crossings and levies. One cannot ask whoever has a stake in the market to act as its neutral guardian. The Charter therefore proposes the principle of the Institutional Firewall, which separates the military establishment from economic activity and from the political sphere, as part of the track of Resetting the Military Landscape. Protecting production begins with severing the link between the gun and the market.

2. Traders: From Exhortation to Structure

The article calls on merchants to return to the markets “in a national spirit” to combat monopoly. The intention is sound, but monopoly in Sudan today is not an individual moral failing; it is an entire economic structure that the Charter calls the gateway economy: networks that control the points of passage (border crossings, ports, gold mines and import licences) and extract rents from them that finance the war and prolong it. This structure is not dismantled by appeals but by specific measures, among them the provision recently added to the Activation Protocol for a comprehensive review of resource concession contracts concluded during the war, and for transparent oversight of gold and export flows. A patriotic trader cannot compete in a market whose gateways are monopolised by those who bear arms.

3. Silos and Reserves: Who Builds When the State Is Absent؟

The article’s roadmap calls for strategic silos and stores to be established before 2027, and for strict monetary and fiscal management. These tasks presuppose a state with functioning institutions and accepted legitimacy, which is precisely what the country lacks today. Here the Charter proposes the concept of ascending functional legitimacy: legitimacy built from below, from the local initiatives, emergency response rooms, neighbourhood committees and agricultural cooperatives that have proven during the war their capacity to feed and shelter people. These bodies derive their legitimacy from what they actually deliver, not from what they claim, and they are the natural nucleus for managing food reserves locally until the state recovers.

4. “A Comprehensive National Settlement”: The Need for Definition

The article closes its roadmap with a call for “a comprehensive national settlement that restores the standing of state institutions.” The phrase points in the right direction, but it is open to contradictory readings: it could mean a settlement that founds a new state, or an elite bargain that reproduces the crisis, as has happened repeatedly since independence. The Charter therefore offers three safeguards:
The Transitional Bridge Initiative, as a practical framework for ending the war and managing the transition, with defined timelines and responsibilities.
Three-tier transitional justice, so that the settlement does not come at the victims’ expense; peace without justice is a deferred truce.
The fourth pillar, institutional regional representation, because the agricultural and pastoral regions on which the article relies (Gezira, Kordofan, Darfur and Blue Nile) are the very regions that have historically been kept at the margins of decision-making. It makes no sense to ask the peripheries to feed the centre while they remain excluded from governing it.

IV. Iftiqār and the Nafeer: From Appeal to Organisation

The article summons “national sincerity” and “will.” These are noble values, but the Sudanese experience teaches that moral appeals alone do not withstand entrenched interests. The Charter therefore grounds cooperation in the principle of iftiqār, mutual interdependence: the farmer depends on the engineer who secures irrigation, the engineer depends on the trader who brings the produce to market, and all depend on security and justice. The principle has roots in contemporary humanist philosophy: Heidegger’s Mitsein (being-with), Levinas’s ethics of responsibility towards the Other, the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the commons. When each party recognises that its survival depends on the survival of the others, “everyone at their post” turns from a moral call into a practical necessity.
From iftiqār the Charter moves to the Grand National Nafeer: an organised social mobilisation that does not wait for the state. The Nafeer also brings in a group missing from the article’s list, the Sudanese diaspora. Their remittances have become one of the most important lifelines sustaining families inside the country, and their expertise in medicine, engineering, economics and administration is an asset awaiting an organised framework to turn it from individual first aid into a contribution to rebuilding.

Conclusion: Completing the Warning

There is no disagreement with Yahya Abnaouf that the war must stop today, not tomorrow, nor that hunger does not wait for the hesitant. But a warning, however loud, is not enough on its own; the Sudanese have heard many warnings before. What turns a warning into a rescue is structure: a firewall separating the gun from the market, the dismantling of the gateway economy, legitimacy built from below through actual service, a settlement with defined safeguards that does justice to victims and regions, and a bond of mutual interdependence that makes the Nafeer a rational choice rather than merely a moral duty.
The author wrote: “Let us stop the war today.” We add, in the spirit of complementing rather than confronting: and let us know from today how we will build what comes after it, so that the coming peace is not merely a pause between two wars.

Arabic Forum