DR MUNA ABDU, an ophthalmologist, is worried. “I am afraid of leaving my country for a long time,” she says, her back to the Blue Nile, dark but for the lights of a few riverside restaurants as it flows towards its embrace with the White Nile in Khartoum. But she still plans to move to Saudi Arabia, where she will earn $6,000 a month—a sum that would take her three years to make in Sudan.
On some measures Sudan’s economy is recovering, after the southern part of the country broke away to form South Sudan in 2011, taking with it 75% of the old nation’s oil revenues. GDP has grown at around 3% a year since 2013. Inflation is in double digits, but well below its level in 2012-14, when it averaged almost 40%. However, on the black market the Sudanese pound trades at only a third of its official value against the dollar. There are just $800m of foreign exchange reserves left in the central bank, according to the IMF—enough to cover only a month of imports.
Businessmen are quick to blame American sanctions. These have been in place since 1997 (Khartoum harboured terrorists including Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s) and were extended in 2007 because of the...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2gPG13R
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