Sudan's Generals Are Paying Teachers Less Than a Cooking Gas Cylinder Costs

Amal Suleiman Ahmed al-Haj has spent twenty-six years teaching Sudanese children. Her monthly salary is 132,000 Sudanese pounds, which is $13.20. A single cooking gas cylinder costs her about $17. Let that sink in. The woman entrusted with shaping a generation cannot afford the fuel to cook her family's dinner.

This is not a glitch in a broken economy. It is a verdict on a state that has chosen its wars over its children. Teachers in Khartoum State have now been on strike for three weeks, and they are doing what their government has refused to do for years: refusing to pretend that a salary of a few dollars is a living wage. When a teacher says her pay "may not last a family more than three or four days," she is not exaggerating for effect. She is describing the arithmetic of a country where the civil service has been hollowed out by a war that its own generals started.

Ask yourself what kind of state pays its educators less than the price of a gas cylinder, then acts surprised when they quit.

The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces broke out in April 2023. Since then, the pillars of public life have crumbled. The UN has documented 67 attacks on schools in Sudan since 2024, and more than 150 reports of armed groups commandeering school buildings. UNESCO says more than 1,400 schools have been attacked and roughly 30 percent of the country's schools are damaged or closed. Other estimates put the figure closer to half of all schools not functioning, either from shelling and looting or because they have become shelters for the displaced and bases for soldiers. In North Darfur, 97 percent of schools have stopped holding classes. In South Darfur only 13 percent are operational. In West Darfur the figure is 27 percent. These are not abstractions. They are classrooms where children once learned to read and now sleep on floors, or do not sleep there at all because the building has been bombed.

At least eight million children are out of school. Think about that number. Eight million children, many of them girls, are being pushed toward child labour, early marriage, and the gun. Poor families are sending their children to work because the alternative is watching them go hungry. Sudan is not merely losing a school year. It is losing a generation.

Now look at what the teachers are asking for. They want the minimum wage raised from 12,000 pounds, which is $1.20, to 500,000 pounds, or $50. That figure comes from poverty-line benchmarks and a cost-of-living study for a family of five, conducted by their own committee. They are not demanding Swiss salaries. They are demanding enough to feed their children. They also want three cabinet decisions taken more than seven months ago implemented: a higher meal allowance, a housing allowance, and an allowance to correct the pay gaps across the public sector. Those decisions exist on paper. They have not been delivered. That is the signature of a government that issues orders to look busy and then forgets them.

The government's response has been revealing. According to the teachers' committee, officials relaxed attendance controls so that schools would appear open during strikes. Model schools were encouraged to raise their own revenue. Some teachers received partial arrears just as new strike dates were announced, in an effort to split them. Prime Minister Kamil Idris ordered the payment of money owed to teachers in all states, but no detailed payment schedule followed and the broader demands on salaries went unaddressed. This is how a government behaves when it thinks the problem is the teachers' persistence rather than its own neglect.

Let us be clear about who is responsible. The SAF and the RSF have turned Sudan into a battlefield, and both have shown contempt for civilian institutions. But the teachers are not striking against the RSF. They are striking against the state that is supposed to pay them, and that state has been run by men in uniform who prefer territory and weapons to schools and salaries. Every dollar that goes to a machine gun is a dollar stolen from a classroom. Every convoy that moves to the front is a convoy that never carries textbooks.

This is also a story about outsiders. Sudan's war has been fuelled by a flood of weapons and money, and UN experts have repeatedly documented how gold smuggling networks and foreign supply lines sustain the fighting on both sides. Those who sell arms, buy gold, and look away from civilian suffering are not neutral observers. They are investors in Sudan's collapse, and they have every reason to prefer a weak, divided, dependent state to a functioning democracy with accountable institutions. Africa has seen this movie before, from the Congo to Libya. The script never changes: outside powers chase resources, local elites chase rents, and ordinary people pay the bill.

We have seen what Sudan could be. The 2019 uprising that toppled Omar al-Bashir was driven by young Sudanese, many of them teachers, who demanded civilian rule, dignity, and an end to the looting of the state. That transition was imperfect, but it proved that Sudanese will fight for democracy. The military coup of October 2021 crushed that hope and drew the African Union's suspension. Every day this war continues is a day the generals are rewarded for destroying what the people built.

Here is what the right path looks like, and it is not complicated. Africa has working models. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable economies on sound public finance, transparent institutions, and a professional civil service that gets paid on time. Mauritius shows what happens when governments invest in human capital rather than in patronage. Senegal, for all its challenges, has demonstrated that peaceful transfers of power and independent institutions can hold a country together. Sudan needs the same disciplines: a ring-fenced education budget that cannot be raided for the war, an independent audit of teachers' arrears published in full with a dated payment schedule, a payroll system that pays wages through verifiable channels instead of through the discretion of ministers, and salary indexation tied to inflation so that pay cannot silently evaporate. Teachers' unions must be treated as legitimate partners in bargaining, not as enemies to be divided with partial payments.

The African Union and the regional bodies around Sudan must stop issuing communiqués and start enforcing consequences. Arms embargoes must be monitored and violators named. Sanctions should target the generals and their financiers, not the schoolchildren. The UN Security Council should demand humanitarian access and protection for schools as a condition of any ceasefire, because a peace deal that leaves children out of school is not peace. Civil society, the private sector, and diaspora Sudanese can fund emergency learning centres and pay teachers' transport and meal allowances while the state fails them.

And Sudanese citizens must demand more than they have been offered. Demand that the cabinet decisions be implemented on a published timetable. Demand that the arrears be paid in full. Demand that no official receives a salary while schools remain closed to children. Support the teachers' committee, document every failure, and refuse to accept excuses dressed up as policy.

Amal said it plainly: "We are not asking for luxuries. We just want to be able to live, get to our schools and continue our educational mission." That is not a radical demand. It is the minimum a just state owes its people. If Sudan's leaders cannot meet it, then they have no claim to govern. Our children are waiting. How long will we let their future be used as a bargaining chip in a war nobody can justify?

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA