Sudan's Big Basic Income Experiment - A Secret Command Thing

11:35 AM August, 02 2020

Sudanese Online
Mohamed Yousif-Vienna
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Translated from German
Sudan's Big Basic Income Experiment - A Secret Command Thing
July 26, 2020 |The World Bank and the German government are stonewalling when asked to finance the huge basic income experiment in Sudan. It looks as if the federal government-sponsored conference for Sudan was merely a distraction from the real donors and organizers of this gigantic surveillance and control program.
Since I wrote about the basic income in Sudan on June 14th and the universal basic income as a wet dream of the World Economic Forum on July 1st, more time has passed than planned until the announced continuation. Because it turned out to be astonishingly difficult to get information about the financing of the program and the donor conference for Sudan organized by the federal government on June 25.It seems to be a secret command thing.
The trigger for my intention to gather more information about the World Bank's plan to put 80 percent of the population in Sudan on the digital line with a mini-basic income of five dollars a month was a tweet from Magdi M. Amin, who served as senior advisor to the Treasury's Treasury Sudan operated under the motto "Towards a new, inclusive Sudan and Africa through economic reform and people-oriented technology".
Amin turned out to be an "investment partner" of the Washington-based Omidyar Network of the libertarian founder of the online platform Ebay, Pierre Omidyar.His focus is "on profit-oriented investments in digital identity". Before joining Omidyar, he worked for the World Bank for 20 years. There, the Princeton and Johns Hopkins graduate advised management on “putting the private sector at the center of development work”, including through a “disruptive technology strategy”.
In a previous January tweet that I found on his timeline, Magdi announced his secondment to Carthum as an adviser to the Treasury. So the World Bank appears to have provided a senior advisor to Sudan's Finance Minister, a former World Bank employee, who is paid by the Omidyar Network, a founding member of the Better Than Cash Alliance. It looks like this and the Omidyar Network could have significantly developed the Sudan Family Support Program for 32 million people on behalf of the World Bank.
The Omidyar Network, together with its Better Than Cash Alliance partner Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been the sponsor of the trust fund managed by the World Bank to finance the World Bank's Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative launched in 2014.
Among other things, the Omidyar Network benefits from having recently funded the development of a standard platform for digital national identity systems by the International Institute for Information Technology in Bangalore, India. This platform is made available to all interested governments free of charge "as a public good".
It doesn't take long to think what the “profit-making” part of investing in identity systems could be, for which the Omidyar Network and Magdi are experts. Controlling a platform through which a lot of (poor) countries build their central national identity systems holds an incredible amount of data, both in terms of financial value and control options.
This is a very strange information, because on June 25, World Bank President David Malpass said at the conclusion of the Sudan Donors ' Conference: " At the request of the government, we have developed the Sudan Family Support Program together with the government. It costs € 1.9 billion. Dollar and is expected to fund transfers of five dollars a month per person for 80 percent of the population, using digital and other extradition mechanisms. The World Bank has set up a "Sudan Transition and Recovery Support multi-donor trust fund" to channel contributions from the partners. By August, we want up to a maximum of € 400 million. Dollar (contributed) to support the Sudan Family Support Program. "
If the executive directors had actually not even discussed this already started programme at the end of June, the decision-making process at the World Bank would be quite problematic. Questions about the clarification of the contradiction and the supplementary question, according to a list of donors to the trust fund, were no longer answered by the World Bank, despite the fact that the insurance is available at any time for questions.
The Federal Foreign Office provided only vague information on the funders and the financing of the basic income programme in Sudan, and for further information on the Trust Fund at the World Bank and on German participation in it, referred to the development assistance feminist. This one wrote to me after some time, the State Department will call me. That happened, but only the vague promise to send anything that has not happened up to now has been made.
I only learned from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that just under half of the total amount of 1.8 billion. It has been provided by the EU and EU Member States, of which 150 million have been provided by the Federal Government. A total of more than 30 states and organisations had pledged money. How much of the pledged money flows into the fund, which finances the basic income project, remained open.
I listened to the donor conference statements. The partly grotesque event, with a lot of Heiko Maas and thanks to Heiko Maas, gave the impression that the target value of 1.8 billion Dollar only got together by the fact that everything he does in the Sudan anyway, once again recounted-sometimes a little bit or even considerably increased compared to the previous year. The US representative even compared it to 2017 to be able to announce an impressive increase. The sums mentioned were mostly modest and they included any kind of money transfer and often also only technical or administrative help or medical material. What was explicitly promised for funding the family support program was extremely modest.
This perception is covered by an analysis of the Atlantic Council, a Nato prefield organization. Their author, who, according to his Twitter profile, used to work for the CIA in Sudan earlier (in the article, that is, he was "Chief of staff to the Special Envoy for Sudan"), writes that it was clear before the conference that no large sums would come together, which is why we have called this not a donors ' conference, but "partnership conference." The promises were full of stretchable mathematics and double counting, the real increase in support "moderately".
My interim statement-a well-founded presumption, no longer: the donor conference served to reverse the basic income experiment in Sudan, which serves above all for surveillance and population control, to impose a shortcoming of intergovernmentalism. As if it were elected governments from all over the world who finance and operate it, and not Omidyar Foundation, Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and World Economic Forum. So those who, together with and through the US government, the World Bank and the UN, are pushing forward the program for the biometrial-digi-tional coverage of the world's population in central databases that can be controlled by the US. Somewhere, the 1.9 billion The dollar is coming from, which is supposed to cost the program that has already been launched. Governments are not overwhelmingly. It's just been done, I suspect, so that the role of Silicon Valley doesn't conspicuate that way.
In any case, this would explain why the financing and organisation of the family support programme in Sudan is such a secret.
It would also be appropriate for the last donor conference, which the Federal Government allegedly held at the behemm of the US government. At the time, it was about gathering government funds and, without conditions or accountability, to bring them into groups and alliances of global health policy, dominated by Bill Gates and the big pharmaceutical companies.
How Sudan became a dance bear
Those who have now become interested in taking a closer look at the recent developments in Sudan will find a good start in three analyses of the International Crisis Group (ICG) of January 2019 ("Improving Prospects for a Peaceful Transition in Sudan"), from October 2019 ("Safeguarding Sudan's Revolution") and from June 2020 ("Financing the Revival of Sudan's Troubled Transition"), i.e. before and after the revolution, which was used to discontinue military dictator Al Bashir and his detachment by one of the Miilitary dominated, military-civilian transitional government with US-liated personnel.
The ICG is a group founded in 1995 on the initiative of US politicians and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with endowment money from George Soros, which "seeks to be the leading organization that offers independent analysis and advice on how to prevent, solve, or better manage deadly conflicts." Their influence is great.
In these reports, one learns, among other things, that Sudan has already been supported under Al Bashir by Saudi Arabia and others, so that it is fighting on the right side in the Saudi Yemen war, and from Europe so that it does not allow migrants from Africa to pass through. The US was already approaching the "terror regime" under Al Bashir, which, as recommended by the International Monetary Fund, drastically cut fuel subsidies and thus sparked the population revolt that led to the (desired) fall of Al Bashir.
The ICG's recommendations on how to move Al Bashir to abdicate, and what has happened since then, such as the refusal to transfer Al Bashir to the International Criminal Court, which is being flawlessly accepted by the US and all other governments, suggest that the revolution was not such a purely Sudanese affair as it was portrayed in the coverage.
According to the ICG, Sudan itself has no money for the World Bank's basic income programme, which is due, among other things, to the fact that the military continues to complain for most of the money and the government has multiplied the salaries of state employees as compensation for inflation. For both, there is criticism from neither the ICG nor the "partner governments" of Sudan. When Al Bashir was still in government, that was different. But who is already criticizing a dependent government that allows one to use the population according to gusto for large social experiments.
Sudan is not an isolated case
Similar programs as in Sudan exist in (yet) smaller scale many. The ambitions are great.
In Bangladesh, since 2013, the Gates Foundation has been funding the BRAC, a major aid organization in the country, to fund an innovation fund for digital financial services. As a result, the organisation's programmes are to be converted to mobile financial solutions as far as possible. In addition, there is currently money available for a BRAC research programme on digital financial services.
The money seems to be frustrated in the sense of Gates. In a paper on 1 July, the BRAC's (Anglo-Saxon) head of the Social Innovation Laboratory, funded by the Gates Foundation and the US and UK development aid agencies, explains how to work on switching BRAC assistance programmes for the poor of food aid and the like to money transfers via the mobile phone.
On July 23, the UN Development Organization (UNDP) published a brochure, the authors of which are campaigning to provide a basic income for three billion people on a digital basis during the Corona crisis.
This kind of proposal is to be grasped by hand, even if it is not explicitly stated how, in addition to the global population, social benefits would be compared internationally, for the very poorest people, for the rest of the world, to the bottom, to survival levels.
Nachtrag (31.07.2020): Today, the answer has come from the Federal Foreign Office. It contains partial information from the German and EU side, but nothing about how much or even by whom flows into the trust fund for the Sudanese basic income. I even believe the federal government is no longer aware of it. However, if the purported judge of such an aid conference has so little idea what has come out of it, that leaves pretty deep in terms of its true role.