From the Productive Village to Productive Sovereignty A reading of Dr. Mohamed Sharafeldin Al-Tayeb

00:40 AM November, 04 2026

Sudanese Online
د. علي عبدالله الخليفة طه-UK
My Library
Short URL


Complementing, Not Confronting series
From the Productive Village to Productive Sovereignty
A reading of Dr. Mohamed Sharafeldin Al-Tayeb’s article “The Smart Farm: Sudan’s Gateway to Self-Sufficiency and Breaking the Cycle of Poverty”

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Introduction

Dr. Mohamed Sharafeldin Al-Tayeb writes from a position we rarely find in Sudanese writing today: that of a credit expert who saw a field project for himself and came back with specific institutional recommendations, not general slogans. His article on the Lootah productive housing project in Hantoub, east of Wad Madani, is not nostalgia for a 2013 visit. It is a serious attempt to answer a question that has troubled everyone who has worked in development in Sudan: how can a successful but limited experiment become a national model that can be scaled and replicated؟
In reading this article within the Complementing, Not Confronting series, we do not read it to refute it but to build on it. What the author proposes is, in our view, a sound building block for a larger structure. That structure also needs the questions of context, power, land and legitimacy, so that a good idea does not repeat the structural mistakes that defeated many good ideas before it. We set this out through the Charter of Salvation and State-Building and its supporting documents.

I. Where the Author Is Right

From relief to production. The article starts from a correct conviction: poverty is not cured by aid alone, and the aim is to turn the family from a permanent recipient into a capable producer. This meets the Charter’s critique of the rentier, dependency economy that has left both the Sudanese state and society hostage to external aid and consumption spending.
A banker’s language, not wishful thinking. The author offers an institutional proposal that can be implemented: a joint financing portfolio shared by a group of banks, with clear credit controls and mechanisms for risk-sharing, performance monitoring and profit distribution, alongside dedicated funds for students, young people, entrepreneurs and productive families. This level of precision is missing from much of what is written about development.
Measuring success by impact. The author refuses to measure success by the number of houses built. He measures it by sustainable income, skills gained, food available and lasting jobs. Above all, he warns explicitly that finance must not turn into “a financial obligation the beneficiaries struggle to meet.” This is mature credit thinking: a loan that overburdens the poor can deepen poverty rather than relieve it.
A system, not an initiative. Finally, the author calls for moving from scattered initiatives to a system in which the state, banks, universities, the private sector and charitable institutions work together. This is exactly what the Charter seeks when it speaks of rebuilding the state on a functional, complementary basis.

II. The War: The Missing Context

Yet the reader notices that the article speaks of Hantoub and eastern Wad Madani as though Gezira State had not lived through what it has since it was overrun in late 2023: mass displacement, looting of stores, machinery and livestock, and the disruption of much of the agricultural infrastructure on which the region’s life has rested for a century. The article also addresses the Central Bank of Sudan and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning as if they were fully functioning institutions, neutral in how they allocate resources.
We do not say this to diminish the idea, but because the idea itself changes when its context changes. In peacetime, productive housing is a development project. After a war, it is a project of resettlement and recovery, and its first questions are different. Who returns to the land؟ Who owns it today؟ What is left of the infrastructure؟ And who guarantees that the productive village will not be looted in the next round of conflict؟
This is where the Transitional Bridge Initiative offers what the article needs: a distinction between what can be achieved now, under conditions of war and transition, and what must wait until institutions are stable. The three-tier transitional justice framework also makes the return of the displaced and the restitution of land and property a precondition for any new allocation, so that a “national project” does not become cover for entrenching facts imposed by the war.

III. Finance: Between the Gateway and the Institutional Firewall

The joint portfolio is sound from a credit standpoint. But the article does not ask what we see as the essential question: who controls the granting of land, credit, licences and market access؟ These are the “gateways” that have historically been used to distribute privilege to those close to power, turning development finance from a producer’s right into a favour granted by the influential.
In the Charter we call this phenomenon the gateway economy, and we devoted Chapter Six of the Activation Protocol to it as the sixth structural gap. The danger is not only the absence of finance. It is that a large new pool of finance, like the portfolio the author proposes, is created without protection and becomes a new gateway in its own right: one the influential compete over and from which the poor it was created for are shut out.
We therefore propose that the joint portfolio and the dedicated funds be built behind what we call the Institutional Firewall: governance independent of the executive, publicly published lending criteria, repayment and performance data open to the public, and oversight seats for representatives of beneficiaries and regions on the funds’ boards. Only in this way does finance become what the author intends, “a tool to mobilise resources and empower families,” rather than a tool for reproducing privilege.

IV. Land and the Regions: From Replication to Partnership

The model the author describes rests on three feddans per family, roughly 1,200 feddans for a single village of four hundred homes. Land in Sudan is not a neutral resource; it is one of the main drivers of conflict. Yet the article is silent on who owns the land and who has the right to allocate it. This question is all the more urgent after the war, since the Activation Protocol, in its latest amendment, provides for a review of resource concession contracts concluded during the war as a condition for any fair programme of agricultural expansion.
The experiment was also born in the heart of Gezira, in the central riverine region that has historically taken the lion’s share of agricultural investment. The article calls for replicating it “in the different regions of Sudan” under the leadership of state institutions, that is, by extending a model from the centre to the periphery. But Darfur, Kordofan, the Blue Nile and the East have customary land tenure systems such as the hawakir, pastoral and rain-fed production environments radically different from irrigated farming, and a long history of exclusion from development decisions.
This is why we believe the Charter’s fourth pillar, regional representation, is what this project needs to become truly national. A national project does not mean one model imposed on everyone. It means a shared framework that the regions help design, so that each region has its own productive housing, shaped to its land, its people and its customs.

V. From Individual Self-Sufficiency to Mutual Interdependence

The article speaks of turning the family into a producer that “can meet its own needs” and is “self-reliant.” This is a worthy goal. But we propose a deeper concept, which the Charter calls iftiqār, mutual interdependence. The human being is not self-sufficient; existence rests on relationship with others, as expressed in Heidegger’s being-with (Mitsein), in Levinas’s ethics of responsibility toward the other, and in the African philosophy of Ubuntu.
This idea has a direct practical consequence for the project. The wells, solar power systems, pastures and storage facilities the author mentions are not individual property belonging to each family; they are common resources. Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel laureate in economics, showed that local communities can manage their shared resources efficiently when they have clear rules and mechanisms for monitoring and resolving disputes. The productive village should therefore be designed as a cooperative unit built on mutual support, not as four hundred isolated families, each separately indebted to the bank.
Indeed, the cooperative form is itself the answer to the problem the author raised: the debt burden on the poor. When the cooperative borrows rather than the family, risk is spread across the community, and guarantees rest on mutual solidarity rather than collateral, repayment becomes possible and individual failure can be absorbed.

VI. The Productive Village as an Instrument of the Grand National Nafeer

The article puts the state in the lead of this national partnership, which is understandable from a writer who knows the institutions from the inside. But the Charter proposes reversing the direction, through what we call ascending functional legitimacy. Institutions do not gain legitimacy by proclaiming it but by what they actually deliver to people, and that legitimacy rises from the base to the top. Productive villages and cooperatives can be genuine nuclei of local governance, where people learn administration, accountability and shared decision-making, and from which higher institutions take shape.
Here Dr. Mohamed Sharafeldin’s article meets what we call the Grand National Nafeer. In its Sudanese origin, the nafeer is collective voluntary work, in which people call on one another to accomplish what no single family can do alone: a harvest, a building, a well. Productive housing can be one of the first instruments of this Nafeer. Sudanese in the diaspora contribute finance and expertise, village residents contribute labour, and universities contribute extension services and research, without waiting for a state whose institutions are not yet complete. When those institutions are complete, they will find working models in front of them to adopt and expand, not ideas on paper.

VII. The Ethical Frame: From a Legacy of Justice to a Contract of Citizenship

At the close of his article, the author recalls the example of the Commander of the Faithful, Umar ibn al-Khattab, may God be pleased with him, in caring for the hungry and the needy. This reflects a sincere moral sense that we respect and share. In the Charter, however, we have chosen to ground the commitment to fighting poverty on an explicitly civic basis: the state is responsible for the dignity of its citizens not as a favour or an act of charity, but because this is the essence of the contract on which its legitimacy rests. This grounding does not undo the moral meaning the author intended. It turns it into a right that can be claimed and enforced, and that can unite Sudanese across their different frames of reference.
We also note, as an invitation rather than a criticism, that the article’s title promises a “smart farm,” while its body is about productive housing and finance. Perhaps the author, with his expertise, will devote a later article to the technical side: managing water, solar energy and soil, choosing crops, and calculating production costs. Sudanese readers need this.

VIII. Open Questions to the Author

We close this reading with questions for Dr. Mohamed Sharafeldin Al-Tayeb, as a witness to the experiment and an expert in financing it. We believe the answers hold the real lesson that any future national project needs:
1. What happened to the Hantoub project after 2013؟ Was the village completed with its four hundred homes, what were the repayment rates, and how did beneficiary families’ incomes develop؟
2. Why was your recommendation for a joint portfolio not adopted at the time؟ Was the obstacle technical and banking-related, political, or related to land and collateral؟
3. How did beneficiary families come to join the project؟ Who set the selection criteria, and were they made public؟
4. What happened to the project during the war, and what can be salvaged from it today؟
5. In your credit judgement, is the cooperative form more likely to be repaid than individual financing to families؟

Conclusion

Dr. Mohamed Sharafeldin Al-Tayeb is right that poverty is not cured by aid alone, that agriculture does not rise on land and water alone, and that finance does not achieve its purpose simply by disbursing money. We would add that a good idea does not achieve its purpose simply because the state adopts it. It must be protected from the gateways that defeated what came before it, built in genuine partnership with the regions, founded on mutual interdependence rather than isolated self-sufficiency, and draw its legitimacy from the people it was created to serve.
In this sense, productive housing is not only an anti-poverty project. It is a step on the road to productive sovereignty, which is the economic face of state-building. This is what we hope to share with the author and with everyone who believes that Sudan, with its land and its people, deserves to pass on to its children the capacity to produce and to live in dignity, not the habit of waiting for aid.

Arabic Forum