South Sudan should demobilise armed groups, engage them in jobs
By Anyang’ Nyong’o
Why has South Sudan become a violent society? Addressing the national dialogue on "state building and development in South Sudan", the Vice President Riak Machar posed this question and looked at the audience anxiously to get some urgent answers.
A vigorous discussion followed for two days. South Sudan was never a violent society. The culture of violence has emerged as a result of the post liberation experience. And this can be explained as follows.
During the liberation struggle many people were mobilised to fight in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). These people included women, children and men. Quite a good number of them were ordinary peasants without any formal education.
When we visited a little village called Nyamlel in 2002 where Commander Peter Gardet had his base and garrison, we found a lot of child soldiers guarding the base. They were fully armed and thoroughly militarised. We asked Gardet why he was using child soldiers, and whether he knew that international law prohibited this practice.
His answer was very simple. He did not care about international law; he had never heard about such a thing! He asked us: "What do you want me to do with these boys and girls when their own parents, uncles and aunties have gone away to join the SPLA and fighting elsewhere?
They have asked me to tell them who is going to defend them in this village with or without me. Worse still, they have no schools to go to, and when they plant crops the Arabs come and burn their fields. They say defence must be their first means of existence."
After liberation and signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement these child soldiers, now grown up, have only known the gun and defence as their first line towards livelihood. If demobilised they need first to go to school, be given skills and to begin a new life. This does not happen over night.
For some time the demobilised soldier will see the gun as his or her means of livelihood, hence the tendency for violence to proliferate if these demobilised sans-culottes are not trained or retooled into more productive and peaceful means of livelihood. Uganda — in the post-Amin period — Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa have all been faced with this phenomenon of the demobilised and violence prone soldiers. It is necessary to examine how each country has dealt with the phenomenon and with what success.
The most successful model is when the demobilised soldier is an individual with some education and skills that he can use in a new professional employment like in the civil service. Quite often some quick training and retooling will lead to more willingness to drop the gun and pick up the new profession.
But we need to go much further back in history to see how best a demobilised sans-culottes soldier can be lured into dropping the gun and engaging in a more peaceful engagement in life. Kenya provides a good example. Soon after independence the Kikuyu peasants who had formed the bulk of Mau Mau fighters were successfully demobilised and given land as peasant farmers, thereby beginning a new peaceful mode of existence.
The difference between the Kenyan peasant rebels and their South Sudanese counterparts is that the Mau Mau rebellion was rooted much more on land issues than was the rebellion in South Sudan.
In South Sudan the Arabs from the north had not taken any land from the southerners; they had simply decided to deny them independence after the departure of the British colonialists and declare perpetual servitude over them.
Land, as it were, was simply not to be accessed as a means of livelihood since it would give strength of existence among the rebels. Hence the burning of fields and the alienation of the people from agricultural production for decades until the child soldiers grew up not knowing agriculture as a means of livelihood!
To reconnect the demobilised soldier with a new peaceful means of livelihood a major development plan needs to be embarked on. South Sudan’s Public Service Minister Awot Deng’ Acuil proposed that a human capacity development programme, focused on massive education and skills building from below, needs to be embarked on. This needs to be complemented by a robust private sector in all sectors of the economy that will absorb the various skills developed.
Further, it is to be noted that the old Chinese gimmick —Countries want independence, nations want liberation and people want revolution — is still very apt in such post liberation settings as in South Sudan.
What the SPLM/SPLA has done is to achieve independence for South Sudan as a country. The nation of South Sudan is still to be liberated from the shackles of colonialism by establishing a national, democratic and developmental state.
In this process, the people will find the political space and economic means to fight for their revolution, the building of the new South Sudanese person liberated and in charge of his or her life. This will provide the meaningful context in which the culture of violence will be replaced by the culture of productive life and civility in day-to-day life.
How does the Southern Sudanese go through these three stages of development in the post independence period? This should be the subject of the next dialogue.
The writer is Minister for Medical Services
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