Digitalisation infrastructure and the politics of rebuilding Khartoum
The message and the messenger
The notification arrived early in the morning, Ajman time. It was not a direct message, but a quiet signal that my mother had been added to a WhatsApp group called 'Kahrabaa al hay', the Arabic phrase for 'neighbourhood electricity'. She gave me her phone; I was still in bed, the phone tilted against the light coming through the curtains, when I scrolled to the first message. It was from a person I did not recognise, who had written in careful, slightly formal Arabic, as if wishing to be taken seriously.
The sender explained that he had been coordinating with the relevant authorities at the Sudan Electricity Holding Company to restore the grid and the distribution transformer serving our street, and that the cost would be shared among us. He provided an account number and an amount to be paid through the Bankak phone application (a smartphone app previously known as mBOK) for Bank of Khartoum accounts. The account belonged to a person I didn't know, and he sent a figure in Sudanese pounds that, in the new arithmetic war currency, I had to calculate three times before I trusted my own reading. I put the phone down and told my mother we needed more information before transferring the money that he asked for.
For the diaspora, rebuilding Khartoum from afar often begins with messages like the one my mother got. These messages swarm WhatsApp groups, texting and forwarding voice notes. They are not simply requests for payment or sharing information. They are the everyday practices through which the diaspora are drawn back into the practical work of repair. They involve checking whether a request is genuine, deciding whom to trust, coordinating with relatives on the ground and translating fragmentary digital objects into action.
Participation in the reconstruction of our homes and cities depends less on being physically present and more on our networks, on the people we trust, on being assured and on being familiar. The question raised by that early-morning notification is not merely one of money. It is a question of how people displaced from Khartoum remain connected, and how infrastructures and social ties are being pieced back together through digital networks and objects.
Custodianship in wartime
Four years ago, one week before the war began in April 2023, my mother left Khartoum for what was meant to be an ordinary visit. She never returned. In her absence, the house became a battlefield where bullets pierced the walls, furniture and appliances were looted, clothes were scattered across rooms, and memories disappeared along with everything.
After the SAF claimed victory in parts of Khartoum and forced the RSF to withdraw from the city, our house was occupied again, only this time by my cousin and his family. In a Sudanese logic shaped by war and absence, a house should not remain empty. Someone trusted, preferably family, must watch, report and be present in ways that the rest of us, who are scattered across countries, cannot be.
My mother now knows the house through my cousin's voice notes and blurry photographs he occasionally sends. She knows which streets were held, which houses were entered, what SAF and RSF did to the neighbourhood and what remains possible to repair. In our absence, he is the custodian of the place.
As we were discussing the first message, another WhatsApp message arrived, calling on house owners and tenants to remove "Al Jabbada," the splice soldiers made when they needed power after house cables were destroyed, or we face fines. My mother immediately left my cousin a voice note asking him to coordinate with the neighbours while also knowing that he has his way of arranging such things on the ground.
The neighbourhood WhatsApp group has become a site of collective navigation. Information circulates there before it appears on official channels. A flux of information on fine amounts of up to three million Sudanese pounds, the official website updates, the meter revision code, and the instruction to purchase electricity through Bankak by sending at least SDG 70,000. The sources are often unverifiable, but the content mostly turns out to be accurate.
The neighbourhood WhatsApp group has become a site of collective navigation. Information circulates there before it appears on official channels.
My mother learned to read such messages carefully, with the caution she acquired over the past four years of war. She forwards messages to my cousin, asks him to check and wait before acting. Although she is not in Khartoum, her phone becomes a node through which information, money, trust and repair move. Through WhatsApp, she is helping in connecting people who need to find each other in the absence of reliable public coordination.
Post-insurgency reconstruction
The jabbada must be removed before the meter can be activated. We must pay meter rent for the past "four years," as if we had willingly refused to pay. A minimum of SDG 70,000 per month is required before the house can be "connected", in the state's vocabulary. Electricity is not merely a utility; it is also a legibility device in the sense developed by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State. Scott argues that modern states try to make populations, property and territory readable to administration through records, standard measurements, official categories and systems that allow people and places to be taxed, governed, and monitored. Now the electricity meter, in Khartoum, performs this work of legibility. A house becomes visible to the state not because it has been protected, repaired, or provided with electricity and other public services, but because it can be attached again to an account, a PIN code, a payment history and a monthly obligation.
A minimum of SDG 70,000 per month is required before the house can be "connected", in the state's vocabulary.
The official website, the activation code, the monthly electricity purchase, the fine for failing to remove al-jabbada, and the instructions to pay through the Bankak app are not only simple administrative procedures, but also a neoliberal infrastructure of reconnection. Returning home and to Khartoum is made contingent on re-enrolment as a paying consumer of utilities, verified through digital systems and managed through neighbourhood WhatsApp groups. The state is not restoring electricity as a right of citizenship or as part of repairing the damage caused by war. It says first settle old meter rent, remove the traces of military occupation at your own cost, or we pay fines if we fail to comply. We must purchase a minimum amount of electricity before the house can be recognised as "connected" by the state's standards. In this arrangement, service comes after payment, and citizenship is translated into capacity to pay. In the words of Naomi Klein, these are the tactics of "shock doctrine", when wars, disasters, and moments of collective disorientation can be used to impose market logics that would otherwise face resistance. Post-war reconstruction in Khartoum appears as an extreme neoliberal shock doctrine. The state has withdrawn from delivering services, yet it has not withdrawn from demanding payment.
The irony that runs through all this is that the same digital infrastructure that makes diaspora participation possible also creates new channels for exploitation. We are charged for years of displacement, fined for wartime, pressured to pay through opaque channels and made dependent on informal intermediaries whose authority is difficult to verify. WhatsApp groups and banking applications formalise return as an extractive process, one in which the state captures value from people's desire to go home while offering nothing. The conundrum is that we purchase ourselves back into a state that profits from some of its people to kill the others, in places where the lights were always off to begin with.
This Sudanese Perspectives blog post is written by Azza Mustafa Babiker Ahmed.
Azza Mustafa Babiker Ahmed is a Sudanese anthropologist and independent researcher specialising in urban transformation, artificial intelligence and the ethics of care in African sociotechnical landscapes, sustainable development, and peace research.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the SNAC project or CMI.
