Dec 5th 2019KHARTOUMSOUAD AL-SAWY squints in the glare of the mid-afternoon sun, searching for a bus home. The 18-year-old student’s commute used to take 20 minutes, but these days it can take up to 90. “It’s getting worse every day,” she sighs. Although life after the revolution has improved in many ways—for instance, a hated law that banned women from wearing revealing clothing was repealed last month—freedom was not supposed to involve so many traffic jams.Seven months after the fall of Omar al-Bashir and his 30-year-long kleptocracy, Sudan is struggling to escape the legacy of corruption and mismanagement he bequeathed it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the traffic-clogged streets of Khartoum, the capital, where public transport has all but disappeared. So bad is the shortage of buses that the interim government has decreed that vehicles belonging to the police and army be used to ferry ordinary people about the city.Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address