‘Corrupt agriculture projects in Sudan’s Blue Nile’: memorandum

The native administration of Sudan’s Blue Nile state raised a memorandum to the Presidency of the Republic about corruption in the agricultural projects. In El Gezira state, tensions about the agricultural scheme continue, as members of the National Congress Party have threatened to resign. The authors of the memorandum in Blue Nile state hold the governor, Hussein Yassin, responsible for the violations in the file of the distribution of agricultural projects. ‘The Minister of Agriculture and Forestry has distributed thousand acres to each member of the Legislative Council,’ the native administration claimed in its memorandum. It added that ‘58,000 acres are wrongfully distributed to one of the leaders’ in Blue Nile. It described Governor Yassin as ‘weak’. In El Gezira state, 24 members threatened to resign from the ruling National Congress Party to join the Reform Now Movement. They protest the decision to stop the distribution of lands for which they have applied since a year. During a press conference in Khartoum on Sunday, President Al Bashir accused farmers and other people working at the state’s agricultural scheme of stealing from El Gezira Scheme’s Fund. Members of El Gezira and El Managil Farmers Association were furious. “Al Bashir accused us in an attempt to cover up for the widespread corruption of his government,” a member of the Farmers Association told Radio Dabanga. He claims that he has documents in which corruption and management failures by the government in the El Gezira Scheme are exposed. File photo: Agricultural land in Blue Nile state (Radio Tamazuj) Related: Sudan: Farmers’ fury at Al Bashir’s accusations of theft (3 December 2014) 111 cancer deaths in Sudan’s El Gezira this year (28 October 2014)