From “Who Profits؟” to “How Do We Make Peace Pay؟” A reading of Dr. Fadl Mohieldin Taher’s article

00:22 AM October, 27 2026

Sudanese Online
د. علي عبدالله الخليفة طه-UK
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From “Who Profits؟” to “How Do We Make Peace Pay؟”
A reading of Dr. Fadl Mohieldin Taher’s article “The War Economy in Sudan: Who Profits When the Nation Loses”
Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha
“Complementing, Not Confronting” series — October 2026

Introduction

On 21 October 2026, Dr. Fadl Mohieldin Taher published a compact article on SudaneseOnline titled “The War Economy in Sudan: Who Profits When the Nation Loses.” It opens with a sentence that captures its entire thesis: “Dictatorships do not wage their wars in defence of the nation, but in defence of their interests and their seats.” The author goes on to dissect war as the opium of power: it silences questions, enriches its profiteers, divides the people the better to subdue them, and assassinates the revolution. He closes with four demands for “weaning” the country off war, and with a call to replace the question “When will the war stop؟” with a truer one: “Who benefits from it, and who protects it؟”
This reading does not come to contest the article, but to complement it. The article asks the right question with courage, and its demands come close to much of what is set out in the Charter of Salvation and State-Building (Ninth Revision, October 2026) and in its companion documents, the Activation Protocol and the Transitional Bridge Initiative. Yet between the question and the answer lies a distance — the distance of mechanisms: how is a sound diagnosis translated into institutions that make weaning possible rather than merely desirable؟ That distance is the subject of this reading.

I. Where the Article Meets the Charter

The article converges with the Charter on five essential points, which deserve to be stated before any gap is discussed:
Moving the question from time to interest. Asking “Who benefits؟” is the correct entry point for any political-economy analysis of war, and it is the same entry point from which the Charter diagnoses parallel financing networks.
Refusing to read each war as an isolated incident. The author links the wars in the South, Darfur, South Kordofan and the Blue Nile, and the war of April 2023, with a single thread — consistent with the Charter’s reading of “the recurring cycle of marginalisation, rebellion and coup over seventy years” (Section I).
Diagnosing the militia that turned on its maker. This is the lesson on which the Charter builds its insistence on ending the phenomenon of “parallel armies” under all their names (Section III, second).
Rejecting the truce as an end in itself. The author’s statement that a ceasefire which does not dismantle the structures that make war attractive is “merely a rest between two rounds” almost mirrors the heading of the Charter’s Section IV: “The ceasefire as an entry point, not an end.”
Making peace more profitable than war. This is the third of the author’s demands, and the point in the article closest to the principle of mutual interdependence (iftiqār) on which the Charter rests.
This convergence is not incidental. It means that the disagreement, where there is one, concerns not the destination but the road to it. That is where the work of complementing begins.

II. From “the Hand of Dictatorship” to “the Absence of the State”: When Ending the War Is Not Enough

The article reads war primarily as an instrument in the hands of authoritarian power, and it ends with a call to “knock the opium out of the hand of dictatorship.” This is true in part. But the list of beneficiaries the author himself enumerates — “militia leaders, arms dealers, gold smugglers, and the regional intermediaries” — reveals a structure wider than any single regime, one capable of surviving the fall of the dictator, as it survived the transitional period that followed the December revolution.
The author says of these beneficiaries: “They do not want the war to end, because its end means the end of their privileges.” Here the Activation Protocol goes a step further in its sixth chapter (The Shadow Economy Gap). It identifies a layer of “gateway lords” — second- and third-tier field commanders running organised levies on trucks, livestock and gold — and concludes that these networks have become a self-sustaining economic structure “whose direct interest is tied neither to the continuation nor to the cessation of the war, but to the continued absence of the state itself.” The Protocol draws on an investigative report by Sudan Tribune (29 July 2026) that documented more than 108 checkpoints and estimated the levies at 22 main points at around 600 million Sudanese pounds a day; these are the investigation’s own estimates, not official data.
The practical consequence of this diagnosis is serious: “Whoever signs on behalf of an armed party does not necessarily hold real authority over whoever collects at the gate.” In other words, a peace agreement signed by leaders does not necessarily dismantle what has accumulated below. The Protocol cites Colombia after the November 2016 agreement as a cautionary lesson: weapons were handed over with relative success under UN supervision, but part of the cocaine and illegal-mining financing networks passed to dissident factions that inherited the economic structure without its political cover.
This is why the Charter does not settle for a security response alone. It separates two tracks: the weapons track, subject to integration, demobilisation and restructuring; and the money track, handled by the Independent Authority for Dismantling the Shadow Economy in cooperation with the civilian institutions established in Section VI (Financial Sovereignty) — the civilian Central Bank; the independent agency for the governance of gold and extractive resources, operating to the standards of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI); the unified sovereign account; and the transfer of companies and commercial activities owned by the regular military and security institutions to civilian ownership. In this way the author’s second demand — “a transparent economy whose resources are managed by law, not loyalty, in which the outlets of smuggling and privilege are closed” — moves from principle to named institutions.

III. Accountability: Between the Ceiling of Justice and the Possibility of Peace

The author calls for “genuine accountability for everyone who ignited the war, financed it or profited from it, for there is no peace on the ruins of justice.” The principle is beyond dispute, but framed this broadly it carries a paradox: if everyone who profited from the war is equally liable to account, then every armed actor — and every driver who paid the levy, every small trader forced to deal with the gate — becomes a potential adversary of peace, and we return to the very impasse the article criticises.
The Charter resolves this paradox with three complementary tools:
The three-tier structure of transitional justice (Section V): local reconciliation councils for community-level violations; a Truth and Compensation Commission for national documentation and redress; and a Grave Crimes Chamber for serious violations that may not be subject to reconciliation or to the logic of “truth for amnesty,” operating on the principle of complementarity with the International Criminal Court in matters referred to it by the Security Council.
The separation between the institutional fate of an armed formation and the criminal responsibility of its members (Section III, second): “integration grants no immunity, and demobilisation burdens no one with a guilt not individually proven against them.”
The distinction between local actors acting under duress — drivers and small traders — and the “gateway lords” who accumulated real wealth (Protocol, Chapter Six), with the appearance of a name in the Authority’s database treated as “a presumption requiring verification, not a final verdict,” so that no measure is taken against anyone except by a reasoned decision open to appeal before an independent judicial body.
The Charter adds a temporal safeguard of no less importance: transitional justice mechanisms, especially the documentation of violations and the protection of witnesses, are to begin “in parallel with the ceasefire, immediately — not some time after it” (Section IV, third), so that evidence and the living memory of victims are not lost in the gap between the two agreements. Justice thus remains undiminished without itself becoming fuel for a new round.

IV. One Professional Army: How Do We Get There, and Who Governs Until We Do؟

The article’s first demand — “a single professional army subject to an elected civilian authority, with no place in it for any militia or parallel army” — is the core of the Charter’s Section III (Resetting the Military Landscape), which treats the subordination of armed force to civilian authority as “the real test by which the seriousness of any transitional project is measured.” Yet the demand leaves two questions open: how do we reach such an army from a reality of multiple armed bodies؟ And who governs in the interval between the end of the war and the ballot box؟
On the first question, the Charter proposes three simultaneous tracks — integration on professional criteria; demobilisation coupled with genuine economic reintegration; and institutional restructuring — that apply “to all formations without exception,” including the Armed Forces themselves as regards restructuring. It adds constraints derived from the principle of the Institutional Firewall: a ceiling of twelve years for senior commands; a prohibition on combining command of any armed formation with partisan political activity; and the separation of army command from the headship of state (Section III, fourth and fifth).
The Transitional Bridge Initiative governs the timing through the principle of “sequencing, not simultaneity”: deep restructuring is managed from within an established political legitimacy rather than wrested from a party that sees it as an existential threat, but its timetable is agreed and signed together with the formation of the transitional government, not afterwards — for “the difference between ‘postponement’ and ‘sequencing’ is the existence of a written date.”
On the second question, the Charter proposes that, until ascending representation is complete, affairs be conducted by a small transitional body of non-partisan competent figures, accountable to the first ascending representative body to be formed (Section IV, fourth). The Initiative elaborates this as a “task government” with a 24-month ceiling, allowing only one extension of at most half that period, subject to oversight sessions every six months, and with its members barred from standing in the first elections. All of this is governed by an absolute ceiling: the transitional period may not exceed five years and may not be extended on any pretext, with elections held in stages rising from local units upward (Section IV, fifth). The elected civilian authority the author seeks is therefore not deferred wholesale to the end of the transition; it is recovered progressively, from below.

V. Centre and Periphery: From “Exploited” Differences to a Weighted Quorum

The author observes bitterly that regional and tribal differences “were exploited rather than addressed,” and in his conclusion he promises an economy that “opens the doors of livelihood to the sons of the centre and the peripheries alike.” But the article proposes no mechanism to prevent those differences from being exploited again — and a promise of equality, however sincere, does not protect itself.
This is the place of the Fourth Pillar of the Charter (Section II): the mechanism of “weighted consensus,” which combines numerical representation (a region’s population) with compensatory representation (the degree of its historical and developmental marginalisation), and applies to fateful decisions — the constitution, resources and national security — through a quorum that prevents any bloc from imposing a unilateral decision. Two points matter most in the context of this article. First, a “region” in this mechanism is a geographic-administrative unit, not an identity-based or ethnic entity, and compensation is measured by objective developmental indicators of the place, not by the demographic make-up of its inhabitants. Second, decisions on the distribution of sovereign resource revenues, particularly from historically producing regions, are subject to the same weighted quorum (Section VI, third), “to prevent the recurrence of the pattern of extracting wealth from the peripheries without real developmental return to them.”
Diversity thus ceases to be raw material for exploitation — which the author diagnoses so well — and becomes a constitutional basis for participation: legitimacy built on place, not lineage, leaving those who would exploit difference with nothing to exploit.

VI. Regional Intermediaries and Cross-Border Money

The author places “the regional intermediaries who divide the country’s wealth among themselves” on the list of beneficiaries, yet his four demands are confined to the domestic sphere. The Charter complements this dimension with three safeguards:
Support for unifying the multiple mediation platforms into a single coordinated mechanism, because competition among platforms “gives the armed parties the opportunity to move between them in search of the terms that suit them best” (Section IV, second).
A clear distinction between an international “guarantee,” which binds the parties, and “tutelage,” which confiscates sovereign decision-making.
A ceiling of no more than 30% of the operating budget of any transitional track or Charter institution that may come from external funding, together with a prohibition on any party, political organisation or religious institution receiving binding direction or funding from an external authority (Section VI, fourth).

VII. How Does Peace Become More Profitable Than War؟

The strongest element of the article, in my view, is its third demand — “shared interests that make peace more profitable than war” — together with its closing phrase about “institutions that make the cost of war to those who ignite it higher than its gain.” This marks a move from the rhetoric of moral condemnation to the logic of incentives, and it is the move the Sudanese debate needs more than anything else.
The Charter supplies this logic with its philosophical foundation in the principle of iftiqār (mutual interdependence): no party in the Sudanese equation holds the solution alone, and no component can do without the others. But the Charter makes the soundness of this principle conditional on “the stronger party’s acknowledgement of its need for the weaker beginning before the weaker is asked to acknowledge its need for the stronger,” and on that acknowledgement being translated into real institutional effect in representation, resources and power — not into rhetoric used to silence legitimate demands (Section I, second).
The practical translation is undertaken by the Transitional Bridge Initiative in its seventh item (Incentives for Adhering to the Sequence): linking each milestone — cessation of fighting, start of demobilisation, handover to civilian authority — to simultaneous steps by the sponsoring parties, proportionate to the compliance documented in regular public reports; an honourable professional integration track for qualified personnel; and economic support conditional on actual progress in security reform. The incentives, as the Initiative puts it, “make proceeding along the sequence a rational choice, not a one-sided sacrifice.” And the Activation Protocol’s criterion of success comes close to matching the author’s words exactly: not the disappearance of every checkpoint upon signature, but “keeping the cost of continuing the levies higher than their return, through tracking and accountability independent of the political negotiation track.”
There remains the question of the carrier: who turns all this into reality؟ The author rightly places his hope in the spirit of December, for “the Sudanese proved in December that they are more capable of making hope than the warmakers are of making despair.” The Charter offers this asset an organisational vessel — the Grand National Nafeer (Section VIII), inspired by the tradition of nafeer in Sudanese villages and neighbourhoods and by the experience of the Emergency Response Rooms that have rebuilt solidarity since the war broke out — with a structure of local cells, sectoral teams and a light coordinating body, and with a functional legitimacy that ascends from the peripheries to the centre rather than descending from it.

Conclusion: The Truer Alternative

Dr. Fadl ends his article by saying that “opium is not defeated by preaching, but by providing a truer alternative to it.” The phrase could serve as a title for what the Charter attempts. It does not present itself as a sermon against war, nor as a substitute for existing alliances, but as a blueprint prior to them: a signed timetable with written dates, incentives tied to measurable milestones, institutions that track money as they track weapons, and a weighted quorum that leaves those who would exploit difference with nothing to exploit.
The article asked the question that needed to be asked: who benefits from the war, and who protects it؟ The Charter does not claim to hold the complete answer — the principle of the “rejection of completeness” at its core forbids it — but it proposes an architecture for that answer, and invites the author and his readers to critique and develop it. If weaning begins, as the author says, when the question of the beneficiaries is answered with courage, it is complete only when that answer becomes institutions that make peace the only winning deal on the table.