Why Sudan’s poison is Kenya’s meat

In another six months, the Sudan war will enter its second year. Even by Africa’s standards, the atrocities in the Sudan war, which erupted from a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group in April 2023, are unspeakable.

Millions of women and children have been raped and violated so savagely, they are now committing mass suicide to escape the horrors.

About 14 million people, nearly 29 per cent of the country’s pre-war population, have been displaced. Of these, 11 million have been displaced internally, and three million have fled as refugees to neighboring countries.

The war has killed 21,000 people and left nearly 35,000 seriously injured. Nearly 26 million people need humanitarian aid.

This should be an East African Community war in a bigger way, and we should be screaming louder about it, but it isn’t.

Though it was hobbled for years by Western sanctions and political instability, Sudan was still ticking along rather well.

It had the highest level of irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa, with over 800,000 hectares of irrigated land. It had one of Africa’s largest scholarships for foreign students.

About 20,000 foreign students, many from Kenya, were studying in Sudan on scholarships from the government.

Sudan once had Africa’s largest railway network, with more than 5,000 kilometers of track running from the Egyptian border to Darfur in the west, Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast and Wau in what is now South Sudan.

War in South Sudan, and later its independence, abbreviated the network, but what remained was still one of the best railway services on the continent, even when Sudan’s economy was creaking under economic sanctions.

The prestigious National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum housed the largest and most comprehensive Nubian archaeological collection in the world.

Today, all that has gone up in bombs and machine gun shells. In a reverse of the flow, over 810,000 Sudanese have crossed into South Sudan alone as refugees.

There are a few thousand refugees who have fled to Kenya, with many being from Sudan’s now-dispersed elite ranks. The RSF looted and wrecked the National Museum.

The economic hit from the war has been notable for Kenya and Uganda, but particularly South Sudan. By 2022, Kenya’s exports to Sudan had reached $52 million a year with agricultural and manufactured products, such as tea, household items, and textiles, making up the bulk of the exports.

Uganda, Africa’s largest coffee exporter, owed a good part of that fortune to Sudan, which was the leading importer of its beans.

Nothing of that is as disastrous as the blow South Sudan has suffered. South Sudan exports its oil, which it relies on for 90 per cent of its foreign exchange revenues, through a pipeline to Port Sudan.

However, that was stopped in February due to damage to the Jabelyn-Port Sudan pipeline following a blockage caused by gelling in pump stations situated within a conflict zone.

Controlled by the RSF, it became nearly impossible to get engineers in to repair the damage. The pipeline damage has also resulted in extensive environmental contamination.

South Sudan says it will shortly resume pumping crude oil for export through Port Sudan, following repairs to the pipeline.

The disruption brought the South Sudan economy to its knees and lengthened a crisis which, among other things, led Juba to again postpone its elections.

War, however, brings its strange bounty, often defying the gruesomeness it has wrought. South Sudan has had plans to export its oil through Kenya and then connect to its Lamu Port on the Indian Ocean.

The Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor project includes the construction of a pipeline from South Sudan’s oil fields to the Kenyan coast.

The project has faced delays, but geopolitical developments in the Horn of Africa, which in May saw Ethiopian ships land fertilisers at Lamu Port, their first use of a Kenyan port in more than 20 years, could change that.

If the war in Sudan doesn’t end by the New Year – and not even the wildest optimists expect that will happen – to survive, South Sudan’s best option will be to directly export its oil on an 825-kilometer journey through Lamu Port.

It has two other options. It has held discussions with Ethiopia that have led to agreements aimed at constructing an oil pipeline through Ethiopia to the port of Djibouti, but that is considered a stretch considering that it would stretch nearly 2,000 kilometers.

The second would be through Uganda then Kenya, and on to Mombasa, an enterprise that would take it through nearly 1,600 kilometers.

Besides the cost, the complexity of both would be mind-bending, and possibly take up to a decade to accomplish under current conditions.

LAPSSET, then, remains its best shot. If it were to materialize on the back of the Sudan war and bolster Kenya’s economy and geopolitical stature, stories would be told about how Nairobi’s meat was Khartoum’s poison. That it was built on the folly of the Sudanese. Yes, but those are the inconvenient ways of our world.