The Official Spokesman’s Speech for Hizb ut Tahrir / Wilayah Sudan
At the Press Conference on Saturday 26 Rabi’ al-Akhir 1447 AH corresponding to 18/10/2025 CE
Entitled: “The Government’s Confusion in How to Regulate Dealing with Gold and Its Effect on the Value of the Pound”
(Translated)

After the secession of South Sudan in 2011, and Sudan’s loss of more than 75% of its oil exports, gold emerged as a main alternative to compensate for this loss and to achieve returns in foreign currency. Mining had spread widely in Sudan after around the year 2008, and Sudan’s production of gold became large, reaching 73.8 tons in 2024, ranking fifth in Africa. (AlJazeera.net). However, this large production did not benefit the state nor the people; it became plundered by individuals, and by foreign and local companies, and even what is produced through traditional mining is purchased and smuggled by some companies and entities. To confirm what we have said in this regard, we review the largest gold mines in Sudan, by way of example and not limitation, and how the government deals with these mines!

One of these mines is Jebel Amer mine, located about 100 km north of Al-Fashir city, with an estimated production of about 50 tons per year, according to Reuters, making it the third largest gold mine in Africa. However, the government has not taken control of it; rather, it left it to be plundered by armed groups. The last of these was in 2017, when the mine became the property of the Rapid Support Forces and Russian companies such as Wagner.

Although Al-Junaid Company, affiliated with the Rapid Support Forces, had announced in 2021 that it had handed Jebel Amer mine over to the government, in reality the mine remained under its control to this day.

Hassal Mine, located in northeastern Sudan, is 60% owned by Ariab Sudanese Company, and 40% owned by La Mancha Resources, owned by Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris.
Block 14 Mine, located near the Egyptian border in northern Sudan, known as the Meyas Sand Project, is 70% owned by the Australian company Per Sues, 20% by the Sudanese government, and 10% by a Sudanese local company called Meyas.

According to a report published by Al Jazeera Net, gold from Jebel Amer mine and more than 10 other mines in South Darfur is smuggled to the state of Chad, where papers are issued for it as Chadian gold, and then it is exported to the UAE. The smuggling of gold from Sudan involves influential figures in the government since the era of the Salvation Government, as it was smuggled through Khartoum Airport and Sudanese ports. There are also companies affiliated with the army and others with the intelligence apparatus working in gold prospecting, and the revenues of these companies do not enter the state treasury.

After the outbreak of war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), this war that destroyed most of the economic and other infrastructure, and stopped exports that used to feed the treasury with what is called foreign currency (the dollar), the local currency, the Sudanese pound, began to erode and collapse against the US dollar and other foreign currencies. This reflected on people’s lives, which had already become unbearable because of the war; poverty and deprivation increased, and disease and hunger spread.

In an attempt to stop this deterioration, the Economic Emergency Committee, chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris, held a meeting on Wednesday, 20 August 2025, and the committee issued decisions to regulate economic performance, according to the Sudan News Agency. The most important of these decisions were:

1. Classifying possession or storage of gold without documents as a smuggling crime.

2. Monitoring exports to avoid gold smuggling.

3. Restricting the purchase and marketing of gold to a government entity.

Despite their confirmation that the purchase and marketing of gold should be restricted to a government entity, they violated this decision. There was a meeting in which the dismissed governor of the Central Bank of Sudan, Burai Al-Sadiq, insisted that the Central Bank of Sudan be the only entity that exports gold. A sharp dispute arose in this official meeting, which was held at the Ministry Complex in Port Sudan on 12/10/2025, where Governor Burai adhered to the decision to make gold export exclusive to the Central Bank, while representatives of gold exporting companies insisted on their right to export directly without mediation by the Central Bank. Minister of Finance Jibril Ibrahim supported the companies’ position, and the governor left the meeting angrily. That was the reason for his dismissal the next day, when Al-Burhan issued a decision to relieve him and appoint Amina Mirghani, the first woman to assume this position in Sudan.

Meanwhile, the root of the problem in the government’s handling of gold remains:

a. Placing large gold mines in the hands of companies and individuals instead of the state, causing the country to lose much of its wealth to a few hands.

b. Inability to control the extracted gold and know its quantities.

c. Contradictory policies towards the extracted gold regarding the purchase price, the purchasing entity, and monopoly, which led to the spread of smuggling abroad and to neighboring countries (Egypt, the UAE, and Chad).

d. Not benefiting from traditional mining, which is being smuggled, noting that about 70% of the announced gold production quantity is from traditional mining, revealing the size of the smuggling happening in gold.

Because the gold issue is closely related to currency, the problem of the Sudanese pound’s erosion can be summarized in several main causes:

1. The Sudanese pound is based on the dollar instead of gold and silver.

2. Printing banknotes without backing by gold or commodities, which raises inflation rates and causes the pound’s erosion.

3. Weak exports due to smuggling and political instability, despite Sudan’s enormous agricultural, animal, and mineral wealth that could have made it among the richest countries in the world.

4. Dependence on imports for many needs such as wheat, medicines, petroleum materials, and others, which requires dollars, raising demand for the dollar and weakening the pound. People lost trust in the pound, which kept eroding daily, causing people—especially traders—to prefer holding dollars or gold as a means of preserving the value of their savings, raising the dollar’s price and lowering the local currency’s value.

This is the reality regarding the government’s handling of gold and the local currency—the pound—and it shows confusion and lack of vision in how to address it.

We in Hizb ut Tahrir / Wilayah Sudan, from the standpoint of our responsibility towards our Ummah, present the radical solutions regarding this issue based on the Islamic creed, and we say:

First: Gold, especially mines with non-stop production such as those mentioned earlier, is considered public property. It is not permissible to own them privately by companies or individuals; they are the right of the entire Ummah. The state’s task is to supervise extraction and marketing, and their revenues should either go to public projects for all people or be distributed to them. The state has no right to dispose of public property by allocating it to individuals or companies, whether by grant or connection or otherwise. At-Tirmidhi narrated from Abyad ibn Hammal:

«أَنَّهُ وَفَدَ إِلَى رَسُولِ اللَّهِ ﷺ فَاسْتَقْطَعَهُ الْمِلْحَ فَقَطَعَ لَهُ، فَلَمَّا أَنْ وَلَّى قَالَ رَجُلٌ مِنْ الْمَجْلِسِ: أَتَدْرِي مَا قَطَعْتَ لَهُ؟ إِنَّمَا قَطَعْتَ لَهُ الْمَاءَ الْعِدَّ. قَالَ: فَانْتَزَعَهُ مِنْهُ»

“That he went to the Messenger of Allah (saw) and asked him to allocate him the salt, so he allocated it to him. When he turned away, a man from the assembly said: Do you know what you allocated to him? You have only allocated to him perpetual water. So he took it back from him.”

Perpetual water is that which does not run out, i.e., he had allocated to him a mineral that does not run out, because salt is a mineral like perpetual water.

Therefore, it is not the government’s right to grant any part of gold to companies. It must make agreements with companies for fixed amounts for extraction for public benefit, not for companies’ benefit. Companies have no right to the extracted gold. This guarantees that all gold remains in the hands of the state to be spent for the Ummah’s benefit.

Second: The basis of the state’s currency must be gold and silver. The Prophet (saw) approved the Roman dinar and the Persian dirham as the Islamic state’s currency by a known weight until the Islamic dinar was minted at a weight of 4.25 grams and the dirham at 2.975 grams of silver, until the dollar dominated after US President Nixon’s decision to cancel the dollar’s linkage to gold. The dollar became the currency upon which almost the entire world relies. Hizb ut Tahrir published the Draft Constitution for the Khilafah State in which Article 167 states:

“The currency of the state is gold and silver, minted or unminted. The state is not permitted to have any currency other than them. The state may issue something else instead of gold and silver on the condition that there is in the state’s treasury what equals it in gold and silver. The state may issue copper, bronze, paper, or anything else and stamp it in its name as currency for itself if it has a full equivalent in gold and silver.”

We determined gold and silver as the basis because Islam linked gold and silver to fixed rulings that do not change, such as blood money, 1000 gold dinars, and the amount for the hadd of theft being a quarter of a dinar or more, and other rulings linked by Sharia to gold and silver. Islam made zakat on currency based on gold and silver, and all financial transactions in Islam are based on gold and silver.

Third: Sudan is the land of gold. When it makes gold the basis of its currency, its currency will be the strongest and most valuable because it has intrinsic value not affected by anything else. Its value remains stable; it may decrease slightly or increase slightly, but it will never be like the current erosion of the Sudanese local currency. This would be achieved by applying Sharia’s rulings regarding gold.

The Prophet (saw) said: «...وَفِي الرِّكَازِ الْخُمُسُ» “...and in buried treasure (rikaz) is one-fifth.”

The state takes all the perpetual mines that do not run out, and it has the right to one-fifth of what individuals produce.

Fourth: The entity that applies these radical solutions is a principled independent state, not a functional state like our current situation, subordinate to the colonialist disbeliever who seeks to plunder resources, impoverish the people, and work to tear their unity to weaken them! America, which separated South Sudan so Sudan would not benefit from oil, now seeks to separate Darfur, rich in gold and precious minerals.

O People of Sudan: There is no salvation for you except by working seriously with Hizb ut Tahrir to establish the Khilafah Rashidah (rightly guided Khilafah) on the method of the Prophethood, which pleases your Lord, restores your dignity, and enables you to live under its shade enjoying the blessings with which Allah endowed our land.

Wa Assalamu Alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.

Ibrahim Othman (Abu Khalil)
Official Spokesman of Hizb ut Tahrir
in Wilayah Sudan