Truth Face | Ibrahim Shaglawi The Forgotten Wealth

Yesterday, in a group, the Water Resources Forum, a “golden list” of experts in the sector was presented, sparking discussion among specialists over the names included, the names omitted, and the criteria for selection. But the value of the idea, in my view, goes beyond the list to the more important question: Where is this reservoir of expertise, and why does it not become a decisive resource for decision-making? The issue is not limited to water and irrigation, as health, higher education, justice, industry, agriculture, and other sectors are also likely to hold similar reservoirs of competencies and expertise.

Therefore, every ministry and institution should have a database of its experts and competencies, within an integrated national registry of expertise. Specializations are expanding and branching out, and valuable expertise may lie with people who receive little public attention but become crucial when needed. Therefore, the criterion for selection should not be fame, but specialization, experience, track record, and relevance to the actual need for development. What is required is not merely collecting names, but building a system that recovers scattered expertise and transforms quantitative knowledge into an institutional resource present in planning, policymaking, and decision-making.

More importantly, the database should not be merely a register of names, but a national platform for knowledge and expertise, containing professional and academic profiles, areas of specialization, experience, projects in which each expert participated, research and studies, and achievements, so that government agencies, universities, research centers, and the private sector can refer to it when needed.

In this way, we move from an expert list, over which there may be disagreement, to a system for managing national expertise and utilizing it in a way that preserves knowledge and makes it usable.

Here, the idea expands into institutional reform: Why should every ministry not have an advisory council that includes its current competencies and former experts? Not to restore positions, as some may understand it, but to recover practical memory. Those who established a project, managed a crisis, or formulated a policy possess knowledge of details, successes, and failures that reports alone cannot provide. Documenting this expertise and linking it to decision-making transforms accumulated experience from the memory of individuals into an institutional asset from which the state can benefit.

This vision becomes even more important in the post-war phase, when Sudan needs to rebuild facilities and institutions alongside rebuilding institutional memory. Unless we preserve the expertise of those who built, managed, and planned, we may be forced at every stage to start from zero and repeat the same mistakes, while we already have national expertise capable of shortening years of experience.

Accordingly, the “golden list” of water and irrigation experts can be a good starting point, because it has revealed the need for a national database project for water resources and irrigation experts, encompassing all generations and specializations, continuously updated, subject to clear criteria, and linking expertise to national needs.

Sudan today does not suffer from a shortage of minds as much as it suffers from weakness in organizing and utilizing knowledge. Therefore, preserving expertise is not a tribute to the past, but an investment in the future.

 A state that preserves the names and experiences of its experts can build upon what previous generations have accomplished and give the new generation the opportunity to start where others ended, not where they began. There are experiences in the countries around us; the Egyptian, Turkish, and Chinese experiences are examples of this.

Perhaps the time has come to regard national databases as part of the state’s infrastructure, just like roads, water, and electricity, because knowledge, if not preserved, organized, and made available at the right time, gradually becomes wasted expertise. But when it is preserved and properly managed, it becomes a soft power of the state, a productive institutional memory, and a strategic asset for decision-making and development.

Reconstruction begins by restoring the state’s capacity to think, plan, and manage. If the war has pushed many competencies abroad, migration should not turn into a loss of knowledge, but rather into an asset that can be mobilized through a unified national registry.

This begins by unifying standards and inventorying databases, using water and irrigation as an initial model, then expanding to other sectors and linking ministries, universities, professional institutions, and expertise abroad, ultimately leading to advisory councils and an institutional knowledge bank. The measure is not the number of names, but the state’s ability to transform accumulated expertise into policies, projects, and decisions, and preserve it for future generations.

According to #Truth_Face, the problem is not the list, but a state that possesses minds without possessing a system to manage them. The time has come to move toward a culture of institutions: from celebrating the expert to utilizing expertise, and from preserving names to preserving the memory of the state. Sudan does not lack competencies; rather, it wastes them by leaving them scattered between inside and outside the country and across institutions.

Therefore, establishing a dynamic national registry of expertise and an institutional knowledge bank is an important condition for rebuilding the state, because a country cannot rebuild its projects while wasting the minds that built them. Knowledge that is not managed, however great, becomes wasted and forgotten wealth.

Wishing you continued health and well-being.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

Shglawi55@gmail.com