Dr. Lam Akol | South Sudan at ten: Is it doomed to fail?

By Dr. Lam Akol Ajawin

OPINION  – Ten years ago today South Sudan was born as the youngest country in the world; the first in Africa since Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia in 1993. It was a moment of jubilation and great joy. The South Sudanese celebrated together with its friends. It was an occasion of hope and optimism. At long last South Sudanese have broken the shackles of oppression that have kept them down from showing their real potential so as to develop their country and lead it into prosperity, or so they thought. Hundreds of thousands of those celebrating that day are not there today to witness how the country has fared; they had perished in the 5-year civil war that took place since. Despite the abundant human and material resources at its disposal South Sudan, ten years since, is a country suffering from extreme underdevelopment and abject poverty. What went wrong?

Leadership Failure and Conspiracy of Silence

The crisis in South Sudan is traceable to leadership failure and the conspiracy of silence. The conspiracy of silence ensured that the leadership failure was total.

The first duty of the leadership of any new nation was to establish government and state institutions, build infrastructure and deliver services including the provision of personal and collective security for the citizens. None of all this was in the programme of the SPLM leaders who negotiated themselves into being the government of South(ern) Sudan in 2005. They looked at the leadership with a sense of entitlement and exclusion of others. No plans were set in place to run the state and the manpower South Sudan was endowed with in all fields was not made proper use of. Unqualified persons were foisted on the top of experienced and well trained officials for the only reason that they did not join the struggle which to them meant taking up arms. Therefore, even if there were the best of plans only an effective and efficient civil service will bring them into fruition. Lack of transparency and accountability begot rampant corruption which permeated all levels of government and party leaders. These were the words of none other than the President himself who wrote letters to his colleagues in 2012 accusing them of having embezzled government funds and asked them to return the money. As expected, nothing came out of that. You don’t beg law defaulters you apply the law on them.

The SPLM leaders went about with their business with full impunity. Voices that were raised in criticism of some of their actions were dismissed as coming from elements bent on betraying the cause of South Sudan. They continued to peddle the myth that South Sudan was synonymous with the SPLM and everybody bought into that including the friends of Southern Sudan whose support at that time was critical, especially in the areas of provision of democratic space and basic freedoms. At everybody’s peril some of the powers that be thought that these basic requirements of good governance could be delayed. Everybody was forced into silence and the SPLM enjoyed a free hand and run South Sudan in its own image. You either conformed or face the brunt of their wrath. Many chose to watch as they continue to do today. Needless to say, that myth was debunked when the civil war broke out in December 2013. The SPLM collapsed and South Sudan remained resilient gazing into the eyes of the doubting Thomases.

The war was prompted by the struggle for power. As the SPLM convention scheduled for May 2013 approached, the SPLM leaders began to jockey for the chair of the party which automatically meant nomination for the Presidency of South Sudan come 2015. Three leaders put their names forward to challenge the incumbent. The latter was not amused and used whatever power he had, executive or political, to deal a blow to his opponents. Such was the origin of the war that was tribal from the word go.

Downward Slide

It goes without saying that the 5-year civil war has hindered the transformation of the young country into a viable state. But that is half the story. The war itself and the lack of transformation are cause and effect of actions taken eight years earlier. Farmers in Yambio, for instance, could not sell their produce in Juba because there is no infrastructure to connect the production areas to the markets. We were totally dependent on food import from Uganda and Kenya well before the war broke out in 2013. The USA built the Nimule-Juba road many years back. The South Sudanese people are grateful for this gift. But, how many kilometres of road the government of South Sudan can point to as its achievement despite the billions of dollars that entered into its coffers every year since 2005? What happened to the slogan of using oil revenue to fuel agriculture? Before the war, education was getting less than 5% of the annual budget and 70% of healthcare was being provided by the donors and international Non- Governmental Organizations. The government’s hands were already off service delivery. So, let us get it straight: the civil war worsened a situation that was already in dire straits.

Today, South Sudan has excelled in registering the negative development indices. For instance,

• 400,000 deaths caused by the decade of strife,
• 3.9 million persons were displaced of whom 2.3 million are refugees in the neighbouring countries,
• The World Food Programme reported in 2019 having supplied 6 million of the population with food,
• South Sudan ranks 187th out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index (HDI),
• Transparency International ranks South Sudan 179 out of 180 on the Corruption Perceptions Index,
• UNICEF estimates that 70% of the country’s children are out of school,
• WHO estimates that Child Mortality Rate is at 102 per 1,000, and the Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) is 789 per 100,000 child birth, both being among the highest in the world,
• The country is reeling under hyperinflation, rises in prices of basic commodities and runaway depreciation in the local currency.

These are grim readings indeed and no improvement is contemplated. The government has been exercising authority without responsibility.

Failure of Power-sharing agreements

The 2018 peace agreement is a replica of its 2015 version which ended up in disaster. The President himself made it plain before the Chairperson of IGAD in May in Juba that the agreement was un-implementable. That there was no political will to implement the agreement has been clear all along. To date no single item in the long list of activities in the Implementation Matrix has been implemented 17 months into the Transitional Period. However, that is not because the agreement was not implementable but rather that one of the Parties is unwilling to implement it. The most critical activity which would have had a great impact in turning things round, the security arrangements and the creation of a unified army and security organs, is not implemented and is unlikely to be satisfactorily implemented in the two to three years to come. There is already talk about extending the elections because the requirements for holding one are not yet attained. And since none is working for the realization of those requirements, postponement of elections becomes a euphemistic reference to no-election at all.

Friends of South Sudan take comfort in that the ceasefire is holding. But whose ceasefire do they mean? The insecurity among and between communities in South Sudan are claiming hundreds of lives, ironically, in areas that did not see factional wars in the last seven years. Violence is spreading and taking different forms such as was the case in Eastern Equatoria State where the Governor and his Deputy suffered separate ambushes from unidentified armed groups.

South Sudan has reached a cul de sac. The current peace agreement will not deliver results. In fact, it turned out to be a consolidation of the status quo. The Rome mediation between the government and the holdout armed group is doomed from the start, but is a convenient tool for the three parties involved in it: the government is satisfied that its hoodwinking of the international community that it is after an inclusive peace agreement is working, the armed group basks in what it considers a recognition of its existence and the mediators hope that at the end of the day some document dubbed ‘agreement’ will be signed under its auspices. But realistically, under the current circumstances, there will be no added value to peace as a result of what will come out of the Rome Mediation.

What is to be done?

The parties to the 2018 peace agreement should take stock of the status of its implementation. The inescapable conclusion in this self-reflection is that they are on their own: no IGAD or international players are going to tell the major party to implement the agreement in ‘letter and spirit’. So, it will continue to cherry-pick what it wants to implement and what not. One doesn’t need to be a guru to arrive at this conclusion, we have seen that since 2018 and the correct reading of the political kaleidoscope points out clearly that nothing is likely to change. The sad side of it is that even the status quo is untenable as we have shown above. What then is to be done? Is South Sudan doomed?

South Sudan needs a surgical operation to remove the cancerous growth in its body politics. That surgery needs to be done immediately before the cancer spreads into the whole body. It is here that we can seek assistance from the internationals.

Power-sharing agreements have signally failed to solve our problems. In fact, as some cynics opine, they have been serving as a promoter of violence as one agreement after another renews the mandates of the perpetrators of violence. We are in a vicious circle that must be broken if South Sudan is to stand on its feet.

This author is calling for a new agreement between the South Sudanese stakeholders to replace the current 2018 agreement. Let us forget about the high sounding but unattainable, at least currently, objectives of reform and change and concentrate on the single objective of conducting the elections. This means that attention should focus solely on the activities related to the elections. That will be the surest means to change the status quo. The election process requires voters, level political space for all political parties, organizers of the process (the Commission), security of balloting and the ballot papers and means of seeking redress to complaints. Parties should agree on what it takes to set these requirements in place. The bills for the Political Parties Act and the National Elections Act have already been prepared by the National Constitutional Amendment Committee (NCAC) and are just awaiting adoption by the Transitional National Legislature. Once adopted and signed into law, the Political Parties Council and the National Elections Commission (NEC) will be set up and begin their work forthwith. In order to create confidence in the process, the NEC shall have to include international members as was the case in the first parliamentary elections in Sudan in 1953. The voters include the IDPs and refugees who ran away from the government and hence cannot be expected to trust its security forces. Providing security to the citizens when it is needed and securing the entire election process should be the responsibility of the Regional Protection Force (RPF) component of UNMISS.

As to means of seeking redress to complaints, the agreement has a provision on the Ad Hoc Committee on Judicial Reform. That committee has to be formed forthwith so as to recommend the desired changes in the judicial system that will ensure its independence. With all the above implemented, it will need between 12 to 18 months to conduct what can be described as a free, fair and credible election. Thus, we would have saved our country from imminent collapse.

Albert Einstein is credited with the saying that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. We hope we are sane enough.

The author is the Chairman of the National Democratic Movement (NDM) and Secretary-General of South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA). You can follow him on twitter HERE.

---

The views expressed in the ‘OPINIONS & ANALYSIS’ section of Sudans Post are solely the opinions of the writers. The veracity of any claims made are the responsibility of the author not this website. If you want to submit an opinion piece or an analysis please email us here.