Bashir and present danger: Sudan’s coup

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The value of Bitcoin has been rallying again this month, but as ever, it remains volatile. The cryptocurrency just turned 10 years old, but it's still a long way from upending the financial system. One problem is that bitcoin simply wasn't designed as a way to make lots of money. And this week, the human family tree got a little bigger. Human evolution is bursting with new finds as techniques change and remains are discovered far from Africa. But all this information makes the human story murkier, not clearer. First up though, in Sudan yesterday, the defense minister took to state television to inform citizens of some changes after almost 30 years of brutal rule. The president Omar Al Bashir was deposed and imprisoned by his own generals. The defense minister said a transitional military council would take his place for now. The coup came after months of demonstrations against the government. Just get out became a unifying slogan for protesters, which included many women. With much to be resentful about underemployment for youth.

There is hyperinflation. On top of that, there was just a very fast deteriorating economic crisis. But the grievances have been accumulating for many years with a very repressive, corrupt regime.

Nahid Tobia is a doctor and civil society activist who's been participating in the demonstrations.

We have over 130 universities in Sudan. So it's bringing out hundreds and thousands of people who have no future yet. They have Internet, they have mobile phones and they want freedom, they want better living, they want democracy. I think that was the fuel of the revolution to start with and that's what maintained it for four months.

As word of Mr. Bashir's arrival spread through the capital, Khartoum, the crowds were jubilant. But Dr. Tobia says she and others are deeply suspicious of the military.

It's also a very, very sober and cautious excitement. I mean, the streets, the cars are screaming all around us. I can hear them sitting. But there is still a tone of, no, we're going to go and stand in front of the military headquarters.

Overnight, crowds of people defied a military curfew to continue their sit, calling for a transition to civilian rule. This uprising has historical precedence.

This is the third time that a dictator from the army has been overthrown by a popular revolution. 1964, 1985.

And now Richard Cockett is a journalist at the Economist. He's our former Africa editor and he wrote a book about Sudan.

The Sudanese are very sort of historically minded people. The latest push to get rid of bashir started on April 6, which is the day when General Nimeri was deposed in 1985. So the Sudanese are very aware of their history and they're very aware of the cycles of getting rid of tyrants and trying to replace them with something better, something more democratic.

And you say there are similarities with the fall of Nimeri. What happened after he was toppled?

There was an interim government and then there were elections. And the UMA party, a man called Sadiq Al Mahdi, was installed as prime minister. He was then overthrown by omar Bashir in 1989. The problem with Sudanese democracy, this is the reason for these cycles of democracy, dictatorship, democracy dictatorship, is that the parties are very, very fractured in Sudan. So governments tend to be weak and they tend not to be able to deal with a country's problems. And that's when the military, it's very typical. That's when the military steps in and say, we can do this better.

You yourself have spent quite a lot of time in Sudan. What will you remember from Mr. Bashir's rule?

Well, I met most of the ruling elite at the time, including Bashir, and I spent quite a lot of time with all three people who have just been sort of locked up by the army, his sort of closest lieutenants. The main feature was was there an absolute certainty that they deserved to rule and they just didn't care about the rest of the country and indeed were incredibly ignorant about the rest of the country beyond Khartoum. I remember when the country, when the South Sudan was having a referendum in 2011 deciding whether to stay with Sudan or split away. I mean, it was very clear, traveling around South Sudan that sort of 99.999% of vot absolutely disgusted and fed up with rule from Khartoum and they were going to vote. So they had totally lost touch with the reality of how everyone lived in their country and any of the political dynamics and the consequences of the deep poverty and the repression that existed in the country.

South Sudan split from the north in 2011, taking much of the country's oil wealth with it. Repression continued under Mr. Bashir, but the state had less money to placate the people.

The demonstrations started last December, and they really started as protests against rising food prices.

Jonathan Rosenthal is our current Africa editor.

What was exceptional about them was that they spread across the country. They took place in all of the major cities, not just Khartoum. And they've been incredibly sustained. They've just gone on and on for four months.

So what do we know about the demonstrators?

So a lot of them were started by really poor people who were protesting bread prices. But these things soon morphed into a much bigger movement against the rule of Omar Al Bashir. And the leadership moved into professionals, was basically doctors, lawyers, engineers under the umbrella organization of the spa, the Sudanese Professionals association, which has coordinated and marshaled these groups.

And how is it that they eventually gained the support of the military?

Yes, it's very difficult to know what exactly was going on behind closed doors in the past few days in those military circles, but essentially what seems to have happened was the military realized that there was a potential for a sort of massive bloodletting. If the security services and the military fractured, they would have had an open civil war on their hands. So it seems as if the apparitions, the generals just got together and said, you know, the current status quo can't continue, can't be allowed to degenerate into a civil war. And they've now locked up Omar Al Bashir and several of his apparently closest confidants as well as, by the sound of things. And it's not entirely clear, you know, other forces that might have then tried to intervene, including Islamists and the like.

And who do you think will succeed, Mr. Bashu?

So again, that is a huge question. The military's come out and said, we want a two year transition. What's slightly concerning there is that the people in charge are in many cases as bloodstained as Omar Al Bashir, some of them on sanctions lists from the US government for their role in war crimes and genocide and Darfur. So we've got a really sort of compromised group of people who are trying to maintain control. On the other hand, you've got the protesters who are saying, we're not leaving the streets. We're only going to agree to a full handover to civilian transitional government. And then you've got outside players that the African Union for the past few years has had a fairly strong no coup policy. It'll be interesting to see what they say about this open coup and whether they're willing to accept it, or whether the region and neighbours try to push the government into installing a civilian transitional government.

Jonathan, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

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It's 10 years since Bitcoin, the first and still the best known cryptocurrency, was launched. Some believed it would revolutionize the way we use money.

My beer gets run through the till.

As normal, but instead of paying by.

Cash or card, I can use this phone to deduct money from a virtual bitcoin wallet.

Its fame also grew because of its investment potential, with owners seemingly making huge gains overnight. One well known story from 2017 was about a man who claimed to have thrown a hard drive full of what he thought were worthless bitcoin into a landfill, only to discover they'd risen in value to be worth millions of pounds.

Of course, the value of a bitcoin may rise, meaning that that buried hard drive worth four and a half million today, may in the future be worth perhaps tens of millions, even hundreds of millions.

Bitcoin has surged in recent weeks, but its high value has proved on at least a few occasions to be nothing more than a bubble. And it hasn't fulfilled its promise to become a widely used medium of exchange. So 10 years on, do cryptocurrencies still have the potential to radically change the financial system? And are they worth investing in?

At the start of 2017, a bitcoin was worth about US$1,000. And by December, on one exchange, I think it touched 20,000. So everyone was very excited.

Tim Cross is our technology editor.

And then in 2018, the sort of fizz went out. So as fast as the bubble had inflated, it popped again.

Bitcoin's been around for a decade. Give me a sort of an update. What do you reckon to bitcoin now at 10 years old?

So I think you have to look at the history to understand what bitcoin is today. In 2008, when it was first proposed by this guy called Satoshi Nakamoto, which is a pseudonym, we don't know who that was. He or she was hanging around with a group of people online called the cypherpunks, who essentially are computer coders who worry a lot about evil, tyrannical governments and the dastardly power of big corporations and all the rest. What they were thinking was, well, could we create some kind of system that was a sort of rough electronic analog of cash? Because the nice thing about cash is, you know, I can pay you cash for something and, you know, the evil government has no way of knowing that we've done it. And the problem with doing this with electronic money had always been that there's no way really to stop double spending because, you know, electronic money is just wisps of information that live in a computer. I can send one, you know, electronic buck to you, and then I can just sort of by copying and pasting, I could send the same electronic buck to somebody else. And it's sort of hard to stop this. So what bitcoin was was a sort of plausible way to get around that problem. And then what's happened since then is it sort of escaped that little subculture and people have started putting all kinds of hopes and expectations on it. So Jack Dorsey, who's the boss of Twitter, he thinks in 10 years, Bitcoin or something like it will be the world's single currency. And it was never really designed for world domination like that. And the more common use, I think is a kind of electronic get rich quick scheme, because we've seen all these bubbles. This one we just talked about in 2017 wasn't the first one by some counts, it was about the third one. But again, it had never really been designed as a way to make tons of money for doing nothing. So I think it sort of depends on the lights in which you analyze it. But it certainly hasn't gone where the cypherpunks assumed it would.

You say that it hasn't been designed for the way that it ultimately is now being used. What are the design shortcomings?

So what the cypherpunks wanted was a system of money without any kind of central control. And the way you do that is you distribute the job of keeping track of who sent money to who among all the users. And there are special users called miners who are economically incentivized to maintain the transaction, to sort of decide who gets to send money to whom. But the result is you're sending a huge amount of data across a network to lots of people. And rather than sending all that data continuously, the idea is you group it up into batches and you send those out. And the original design decision in Bitcoin was that there would be one batch every 10 minutes as a long term average. And what that works out to you, when you boil it down, is that the theoretical maximum capacity of the system is somewhere on the order of seven transactions a second or so, which is really not very many. So Visa, which is centrally run, can do tens of thousands of transactions a second. And if you're stuck on seven, this is just not something that's going to scale to world domination. And you kind of saw that in the bubble, actually. So when the price was shooting up, the system got clogged because so many people were trying to buy and sell. And the result was that you had to start including transaction fees, special fees to give to the miners to say, hey, process my transaction instead of this guy's transaction over here. And at one point those hit $50 a transaction. Now if you're buying a house, maybe that's not a problem. If you're trying to buy a Mars bar, $50 a transaction is not ideal.

Well, and another thing is that you hear a lot of, well, chicanery going on in the crypto world.

Yeah. So the original idea, as we said, was a currency that is resistant to any kind of government regulation. And maybe unsurprisingly, one of the results of that is you attract a bunch of people who have a keen interest in avoiding government regulation. Right. So you've seen Ponzi schemes, you've seen.

Frauds, hacks, you've seen a lot of hacks.

Hacks, yeah. In fact, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange hacks, Mount Gox, the man in charge of that, Mark Karpele, has just been acquitted of embezzlement by a Japanese court. And it's not just fraud either. I mean, there's lots of sort of, I guess, amateurism or incompetence. So the big story there at the moment is a Canadian exchange called QuadrigaCX, which went bankrupt in February and lost access to about $190 million, I think it was, of its users funds. And their story is that the founder was the only person with access to the money capable of moving the money around. Only he had the necessary encryption Keys. And he died suddenly, allegedly on holiday in India. And now no one can get to their money.

So in light of all these problems, then, is that sort of vision of cryptocurrencies as the future, the future of banking and so on, is that just a complete pipe dream?

Well, I mean, it's hard to predict the future, isn't it? But I think it's hard to see how you go from what you have today to something that sort of could credibly replace the existing financial system. There are some numbers out there. So there's a company called Chainalysis in New York who analyzed Bitcoin's transaction ledger, and they reckoned that in 2018. So this is just after the bubble, when prices were still pretty high, only about $2.4 billion worth of actual transactions with merchants were done using Bitcoin, which is a tiny, tiny number. I mean, if you look at some sort of similar financial innovations, if you look at things like Alipay and WeChat Pay, which are the two big payment apps in China, they shifted something like $17 trillion worth of transactions that same year, and they're of roughly the same vintage as Bitcoin is, but built on.

Top of the existing financial system.

That's the difference. So, yeah, so they're built on top of what exists already. Bitcoin is trying to replicate or at least make a new version of the financial system from scratch. And it turns out that's really hard.

Well, what would you have to do then to make it competitive with what we've already got?

You'd have to solve the scaling problem, this transaction limit, which is quite difficult. You would want a lot more regulation than you have now. Because if you say to most people, how would you like to transact using this mostly unregulated economic system? Most people aren't going to be very keen. So I think despite its anarchic origins, if you do want to try and see some route to world domination, you would need a hell of a lot more government regulation.

Tim, thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

For a long time, the story of where humans came from seemed relatively simple, if incomplete.

So the idea was that we evolved somewhere in Eastern Africa and then sometime around 60 to 50,000 years ago, marched out of Africa and effectively took over the planet.

Katrine Brake is our science correspondent. She's been trying to keep up with the surprisingly fast developments in human evolution.

That narrative, it's now changing as our methods change. So on the one hand, the study of ancient genomes has allowed us to understand things that we never were able to see before. And also, increasingly, people are looking at other continents, and in particular, there's a lot of interesting research that's happening in Asia.

So, Katrine, what are all these new techniques revealing?

A couple of exciting things have come out this week. We've had the announcement of an entirely new species of human. And we've also had a genetic study which is revealing new complications to a very mysterious human that is known as the Denisovans.

So let's start with the new human, and I guess, where does it fit in the sort of the network of humans we already kind of know about?

Traditionally, we've only thought of humans as encountering one other species as they roamed across the planet, and that was the neanderthals. And in 2004, some researchers announced that they had discovered some very strange bones on an island in Indonesia. So it was a very smaller, diminutive human. We now have a discovery in the Philippines, on the main island of the Philippines called Luzon. These bones and these teeth are sufficiently bizarre and distinct from everything else that we've seen to say definitively that it is a neohuman, and we're calling it Homo luzonensis.

And so what do we know so far about Homo luzonensis?

It lived 67,000 years ago, which means that it was alive just before Homo sapiens. Our own species, is thought to have left Africa. So that's very recent. The foot bones appear to be adapted to both climbing in trees and also walking on the ground. In this one species, you have features that are both ancient and modern.

How did these bones, I mean, at one point, presumably a living Homo lucenensis.

End up on an island without a time machine. I'm not sure we'll ever know, but there's a big debate happening about when humans first took to the seas. Some of these skeletons, some much older than this, suggest that our ancestors were able to do it quite early on. We're not going to have an answer to this question anytime soon, but it's definitely fun to speculate.

And you mentioned this second study that is also kind of changing the picture. What's that about?

Yeah, so this is also happening in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia, and it's looking at these mysterious ancient humans called the Denisovans that were around roughly around the same time as the Neanderthals. Until now, we've thought of this group as being one group of humans. We don't have enough information about them to say they're a species. The new research is a genetic analysis. The comparing the DNA of living people in Southeast Asia today to these ancient genomes, including the genomes of Denisovans, to see how much we might have inherited from them. And what it finds is that what we've been calling Denisovans in fact represents at least three different groups of human with distinct histories and distinct evolutions.

And how does the fact that there are these three different groups change the story?

So there's a number of things that are interesting about them, but through their analysis, the researchers were able to look at when they interbred with Homo sapiens. One of the groups interbred roughly 30,000 years ago, and another one possibly as recently as 15,000 years ago. And the implication there, given that we think Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago, is that the Denisovans were the last group of ancient humans to die out before Homo sapiens was the only Homo on the planet.

I mean, I noticed that you've been careful not to use the word species about these three groups that you're now describing. And also we've been talking about the interbreeding of all of these sort of early humans in various ways and so on. It really kind of messes with the good old fashioned textbook definition of species.

The study of our genetic history has revealed that our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, interbred with Neanderthals. We know that they interbred with Denisovans because we still have DNA around today in our cells that came from both Neanderthals and Denisovans. And yet traditionally, we've been told species don't interbreed. Now, clearly these guys did. And not only did they mate, they also had viable offspring who had their own offspring, otherwise their DNA wouldn't still be around today. Species has always been a contentious term. It's always been difficult to know where to draw the line between one species and the next. That's even more true with human history today.

So all of this that we don't really have a definition for the term species, let alone categorization for all these new groups, seems to suggest that what we thought was a fairly complete picture ever looks more incomplete.

Yeah, and I think these days, most people in this field would say that the picture is never gonna get simpler. Right? It's always going to get more and more complex. And most people accept that we are just chipping at the surface of what we know about human evolution. The last 10 have completely blown the field open. I mean, it's just, it's a wild, wild west of research out there. It's really very exciting.

Katrine, thanks for laying all this out.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com comradioffer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here on.