The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) is reportedly investigating two of its senior officials in Sudan for fraud, including efforts to hide the Sudanese army's interference with humanitarian aid deliveries.
According to sources who spoke to Reuters on Wednesday, long-standing concerns over the management of the Sudan project escalated into a formal investigation after parts of the Darfur region were declared famine zones last month.
Signs of severe hunger have been evident for some time, with mass graves appearing faster than any harvests. Foreign journalists have witnessed Sudanese civilians eating dirt to survive.
Sudan has been engulfed in a brutal civil war since 2023, triggered by a split within the ruling junta that led to violent conflict. The power struggle between Sudanese army commander Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former ally, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) leader Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, shows no signs of ending unless one or both are eliminated.
Both factions have committed atrocities, including attacks on civilians and using starvation as a weapon of war. The RSF is infamous for looting humanitarian aid to sustain its fighters, while Gen. al-Burhan has been accused of cutting off supply routes to the militia, disregarding the impact on civilians who are left without access to food and medicine.
The food crisis in Sudan is further worsened by the displacement of nearly 11 million people due to the conflict between al-Burhan's and Dagalo's forces. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), about two million of these displaced individuals have fled across borders, while others remain in regions where already limited infrastructure has been destroyed.
"We are at a breaking point, a catastrophic, cataclysmic breaking point," the IOM warned two weeks ago.
The WFP, awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 for its efforts to combat global hunger, has identified Sudan as one of the world's most critical humanitarian crises. Over 25 million people in Sudan are facing severe hunger, and hyperinflation is making essential goods unaffordable, with staple prices rising by 200 percent annually.
On Tuesday, marking Day 500 of the Sudanese civil war, the WFP reported that at least 36 million people in the region have been severely affected by the conflict. The agency described the situation in Sudan as "the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis."
The urgency of the crisis makes the recent scandal, reported by Reuters, even more alarming:
The investigation focuses on suspicions that senior WFP staff in Sudan may have misled donors, including U.N. Security Council member states, by downplaying the Sudanese army’s alleged role in obstructing aid deliveries to RSF-controlled areas, according to four people with direct knowledge of the situation.
In one example from June 2024, two sources familiar with the investigation allege that WFP deputy country director [Khalid] Osman concealed from donors that army-aligned authorities in Port Sudan had denied permission for 15 trucks carrying life-saving aid to proceed to Nyala in South Darfur, a region at risk of famine. The trucks were reportedly delayed for seven weeks before finally receiving clearance.
Osman, who was rapidly promoted within the WFP’s Sudan office, allegedly used his high-level military connections to control which colleagues received visas to enter Sudan, thereby limiting oversight and scrutiny of the army's handling of aid, according to three people familiar with the system.
The second official under investigation, Mohammed Ali, is being scrutinized for the disappearance of approximately 200,000 liters of fuel intended for WFP vehicles. The fuel reportedly vanished from Kosti, a major city currently under the control of al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), despite frequent RSF attacks on their positions.
Although the SAF nominally approved the entry of truckloads of humanitarian aid into Darfur on August 15, very few trucks have moved in the following weeks, as the al-Burhan regime established a "humanitarian aid commission" to manage all deliveries, which has been criticized for its lack of urgency.
Some smaller aid organizations have defied the regime and delivered food to those in need by any means necessary, but larger entities like the U.N. World Food Program feel obligated to recognize al-Burhan's government as the legitimate authority in Sudan and comply with its directives.
The allegations suggest that the WFP officials under investigation may have misled donors about their capacity to deliver aid amid the violence of the civil war and the bureaucratic challenges posed by the junta. The largest donor to the WFP, by far, is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), representing American taxpayers.
USAID informed Reuters that it was notified by the WFP last week of "potential incidents of fraud affecting WFP operations in Sudan." This statement provided more detail than the WFP's own response to the Reuters report, which was more reserved.
"These allegations are deeply concerning and must be thoroughly investigated. USAID immediately referred these allegations to the USAID Office of the Inspector General," the American agency stated.