The Absence of the Workshop and the Masters…!
Wajh Al-Haqiqa | Ibrahim Shaglawy
Yesterday, Dr. Al-Tihami Al-Zein Hajar, Minister of Education, announced the designation of 2026 as the Year of Technical Education in Sudan, coupled with strengthening partnership with UNESCO to implement the transitional plan (2025–2027) and develop curricula and educational tools. The scene began as a belated acknowledgment of a truth long deferred.
The minister’s remarks about technical and logistical support, expanding e-learning, and building the capacities of cadres—along with affirming that technical education will be a pillar of reconstruction—are indicators that the state has begun to touch the core of its crisis. But the question that tolerates no courtesy is: are we approaching a solution… or merely renaming the problem?
During my experience in 2010 within the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which was then led by Minister Kamal Abdel Latif, I was part of a committee that worked on this file and a witness to a serious attempt to move technical and vocational education from neglect to attention. It was not theoretical, but a governmental effort that opened up to international experiences such as Malaysia, India, and China, and sought to formulate an integrated educational path starting from basic stages and ending at the university. At that moment, it became possible for a Sudanese model to emerge, combining knowledge and application.
But what happened later reveals the essence of the dilemma: the ideas and transfer of experience existed… continuity was absent, and this was one of the weaknesses of that phase.
Likewise, this attempt, despite its depth, collided with a chronic Sudanese dilemma: the absence of a cohesive national model. Technical education remained oscillating between Eastern and Western influences, without the state succeeding in producing a purely Sudanese formula that absorbs these experiences and adapts them to our national needs.
Here, the crisis continued to manifest in its broader dimension. Sudan does not suffer from a lack of visions, but from fragility in transforming them into sustainable policies. Thus, technical and vocational education kept moving between multiple external influences without settling on a national formula that reflects its real needs. Even decisions that seemed qualitative, such as replacing the diploma with a technical bachelor’s degree, did not produce the desired impact, because the social environment remained captive to a view that diminishes the value of manual work.
Today, after the war, this imbalance is no longer postponable. Cities need reconstruction, and a market crowded with job seekers, yet when you search for the “skilled,” you find them rare. This is not an ordinary paradox, but the result of a long path of misplacing the value of education. We have produced an education that accumulates certificates… but does not create skills. We elevated the status of the “employee”… and left the “craftsman” in the shadows without attention.
In this context, the absence of the “workshop” becomes the absence of a space for producing the value of work. With it disappears the figure of the “master craftsman” as a skilled worker and a pillar in the developmental economic cycle, and as the link between idea and execution. Without this link, plans turn into texts without value, and ambitions into deferred promises.
Today, deeper features of transformation in vision are beginning to take shape, as the government of Dr. Kamil Idris moves beyond reforming education as a technical goal, toward redefining the position of the technical worker within the state: from executor to producer of knowledge, and from laboring hand to a mind participating in economic action. In this context, empowering the professional registry as an access tool, employing war remnants within the production cycle, and building workshops powered by alternative energy stand out. These are approaches that go beyond procedural solutions to reshape the concept of power within the state on new productive foundations.
However, the real challenge does not lie in political declaration, but in the ability to transform it into a new social contract that reorders the hierarchy of values. The problem has never been in the absence of institutions, but in society’s perception of them. Over decades, an unjust bias against technical education has been entrenched, to the point that excellence is measured by distancing oneself from the workshop, not approaching it. This is a dangerous paradox in a country that, after war, needs every practical skill more than it needs theoretical certificates.
The question remains, according to #Wajh_Al_Haqiqa: how do we prevent the ministry’s plan from remaining confined to drawers? The answer lies in transforming the idea into daily action embodied in the school, the workshop, the media, and financing policies. Great ideas do not fail because of their weakness, but because they fail to become lived reality. In Sudan today, the dilemma does not lie in the lack of plans or absence of ideas, but in that distance between what is written and what is accomplished, where plans accumulate while reality remains waiting for action. In this void, the question stands: where is the workshop… and where are the masters?
Stay well and in good health.
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
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