Rhino: Agencies – Volunteers in Um Ruwaba city in North Kordofan revealed to Darfur 24 news website today, Thursday, that the Bank of Khartoum closed the account of the ‘State of the Country’ initiative based on directives from the de facto authorities in the state, according to them.

They emphasized that the decision came after the initiative achieved great successes in providing distinguished humanitarian and social services to the city, which made it a role model for transparency and national work, they said.

Hassan Hamza al-Hassan, a member of the initiative, said that the initiative’s great expansion and the increase in the number of volunteers and supporters led to the need to open a bank account. With the Bank of Khartoum branches and other banks in the city out of service due to the emergency circumstances, the group was forced to use the account of one of its members, Hatem Saeed, who is regularly in Umm Rawaba, but the Bank of Khartoum closed Hatem’s account upon instructions from the governor of the state.

‘Officials at the government secretariat reported that the reason for the closure was due to the failure to thank the state government after the return of electricity service,’ he said.

Hassan confirmed that the initiative, which has a WhatsApp group, is a community initiative launched by the sons and daughters of Umm Ruwaba inside and outside Sudan, since the beginning of the war and the entry of the RSF into the city, where it assumed responsibility for overseeing basic services such as electricity, water and health care, especially after the withdrawal of government authorities.

The initiative worked to protect neighborhoods from security risks after the absence of the police, then evolved to provide vital services to the people of the city, and over more than 1,000 days of electricity cuts, it succeeded in securing water for residents by providing generators for wells and fuel to run them, as well as tankers to transport water to areas that do not have access to it.

The group’s efforts also included replacing lost equipment in the dialysis center and trying to restart it, Hassan said, explaining that their most recent efforts, which led to the closure of their bank account, were supervising the maintenance of the Umm Rawaba power station, which contributed to restoring electricity to large areas of Greater Kordofan after a 100-day outage. The group also helped provide food and fuel for electrical engineers who were sent by the state government to help with the maintenance work.

‘The closure of the group’s account raises questions about the Bank of Khartoum’s commitment to the basic principles of banking, as closing bank accounts must be done at the request of their owners, or based on a court judgement, or in the case of violating the bank’s regulations, but the bank’s response to the orders of the state governor to close the account indicates a decline in the credibility of this long-standing banking institution,’ Hassan said.