Khartoum is in a state of siege, with its residents forced to stay indoors --- without water and electricity ---- while the soldiers fight it out on the streets. Khartoum airport is a mess, with a number of civilian airliners and military jets destroyed in the fighting.
As this piece is being written, the conflict rages on. It is yet one more sign of the instability which has characterised large segments of Africa over the decades. It is not just Sudan which symbolises the grave state of affairs in the continent.
There are others. Mali, in the grip of its military and yet busy trying to keep rebel forces at bay, has progressively been on a slide to chaos. Not many years ago, ISIS laid large parts of the country waste, with the ancient city of Timbuktu bearing the brunt of the onslaught.
Observe Ethiopia, where the government led by the Nobel-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been in a state of war with Tigrayan rebels. The action of the government has caused global concern and provoked international condemnation, which has now compelled the Prime Minister to go for some sort of accommodation.
That does not detract from the ferocious manner in which the Ethiopian army and the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front have in recent months gone full steam in trying to defeat each other. There was a point when the Tigrayan forces came close to seizing Addis Ababa. That fortunately did not happen.
And away in Congo, a country which has never had peace since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960 and since its first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was brutally murdered within months of gaining freedom, the chaos goes on.
General Mobutu Sese Seko plundered the country for decades until his overthrow and replacement by Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated within months by his own bodyguards. Kabila's son Joseph ruled for years, but was unable to turn things around. The endless conflict between his soldiers and rebels forced the United Nations to station peacekeepers in the country. The peacekeepers are yet there.
And yet peace has not come to Congo, where M-23 rebels have remained active in keeping the country in a state of conflict. The Ugandan government of President Yoweri Museveni has been blamed for providing support to M-23 and so making a bad situation worse.
The conflict between Congolese forces and the rebels, which had ended through mediation by African leaders more than a decade ago, erupted again early this year. The fighting, which has forced thousands of people fleeing their villages and looking for safe havens, has been concentrated in the east, where reserves of cobalt are clearly a big incentive for the war.
President Felix Tshisekedi's government, inheriting a bad legacy from its predecessors, has been unable to bring Congo under its control. Obviously, with the Ugandans behind the M-23 rebels, Congo remains stymied in its battle to control its own affairs.
One quite cannot predict if peace will someday come to Congo. For now, though, the UN peacekeepers, often in vulnerable circumstances themselves, remain in position in areas where the danger is most intense.
Africa's problems are largely a legacy of the colonialism it was subjected to for long periods in history. Mozambique, Angola, Kenya, Uganda, Congo and a number of other countries which today operate, or try to operate, as sovereign nations have not quite emerged from the tribal culture that has sustained their peoples through the centuries.
It is a truth the colonial powers did not acknowledge or it is a reality they could not grasp when they exploited the continent in their diverse ways. They suffered from the mistaken belief, as the Americans were to demonstrate decades later in Afghanistan, that they could leave behind a landscape of nations shaped into modernity under their benign rule.
That did not happen. Africans certainly were able to come by their countries, but they did not become nations, just as the many ethnic groups in Afghanistan or even Pakistan have been unable to constitute themselves into nations. In this first quarter of the twenty-first century Africa remains home to tribes.
Politics in Africa is based on the tribalism factor despite the noises made about democracy. And, of course, democracy is yet a misnomer in a continent where tribal warfare continues to be a threat to stability. The Rwanda genocide of 1994, with Hutus murdering Tutsis, remains a blot on human conscience.
Dictatorial instincts in the powerful, besides the residual memories of colonialism and insistent tribalism, have been a powerful factor in Africa's inability to move ahead. The old Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was at a point replaced by the more time-appropriate African Union (AU).
But with all the coups d'etat occurring in the continent in recent times, the AU has remained in a state of near emasculation. In these past three years, there have been as many as seven coups or attempted coups in Africa. Mali, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Chad are cases in point.
Every coup has pushed the continent back into a narrative which reminds people of the ceaseless overthrow of civilian governments through the 1960s and 1970s. Lumumba lost power in 1960. Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah was ousted by the military in 1966. Nigeria's Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was overthrown and assassinated in 1966, a situation which led to decades of military-tribal rule, eventually causing the Biafra interlude of the later 1960s.
Sergeant Samuel Doe led a bloody coup in Liberia in 1960. In 1965, the Algerian army led by Defence Minister Houari Boumeddiene removed President Ahmed Ben Bella from power. Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown and murdered by soldiers in 1974.
In these present times, Museveni, who has been in power in Uganda since 1980, refuses to call it a day. Eritrea's leader Issaias Afewerki, once a heroic liberation fighter against Ethiopian colonialism, presides over a country where criticism of the government is taboo. Media freedom is absent.
Tunisia's Kais Saied rules by decree. The demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square in 2011 forced a democratic opening in Egypt. It was all too brief. General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's stranglehold on the country will not be loosened anytime soon.
Africa has twenty-eight of its countries among the poorest nations in the world. Corruption consumes resources, with 47 per cent of Africans eking out a bare existence on $1.90 or less a day. Many of the world's health issues bedevil Africa. A lack of access to clean water, food, medical facilities and shelter hobble the continent.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, battling for power in Khartoum, refuse to let go of this sad African political tradition.
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