South Sudan’s Creation of More Counties: The Manner and Motives.
By Aleu Majok
South Sudan is known as a federal republic but the system of governance is federal in books and face. In practicality, decentralized system of governance is in marginal practice. Thus, in principle, federalism is by far in place while decentralization is intermittently in action. The country currently has ten states and seventy nine counties in total. The number of counties in a state varies from one state to another depending on certain factors that are intriguing to know. The state least numbered with counties has three while the one with the greatest number has twelve. This makes a difference of nine counties between states with the highest and the lowest number of counties.
Dr John Garang outlined or SPLM Vision outlines that towns should be taken to the people but not vice versa neither both. Many have come up to say that the best and the quickest way of doing this is to create as many administrative units as the policy requires. One fact that nobody would oppose is the dire need of towns with their typical living standards. Based on this, whether towns are set up and then people are taken to or as spelt out in SPLM manifesto or in both ways, the bottom-line is that South Sudanese would be happy to see that they live in towns. They will be more contented to see that such towns are not just by name but by the standards.
Recently I had a chance to tour several places in the countryside in three and two states of Bahr el Ghazal and Equatoria regions respectively. I learnt that some states have a lot more payams and bomas than others. I could also testify for myself that the places most people regard as rural actually have towns as their residents consider them. In my payam, they referred to the headquarters as their town. Similarly, Luonyaker, Panliet, Alek, and Turalei in Warrap, Uyujuku and Bazia in Western Bahr el Ghazal and Agok(in Abyei area) among several others were unsurprising called towns by our local friends with whom we had the moment going around there.
Most of these places have not had a functional health facility neither just one secondary school or if present operate very poorly and irregularly. One wonders then whether those are the towns that can be taken to the people or it is just the beginning. During one of our conversations while on the impromptu research tour, an alien friend termed this as a localized fact in isolation. Another South Sudanese fellow supported this with the view that it offends the local people to deny that those are not towns. He went as far as saying that when he left Khartoum, the city he thought was the best in the world, for Rome, he returned to it later only saying that it was nothing to the Italian capital. “In fact it is not comparable to those they call villages in Italy”, he added.
Whatever the argument is and whichever way it goes, towns are needed, must be developed as fast as possible although Rome was not built in a day. But when thinking of a town, thought about its development goes along with it and when thinking about the development of a town, thoughts about money and all the necessary resources must form the crux of the whole idea. The status of a town development depends on the government and the citizens’ efforts but the role of the former predominates. This means the government at all levels (local and central) should provide the greatest share of developmental funds – the crux above. The individual citizens on their parts have to play their role as well. The cardinal question then is; how can the government play its lion’s share role together with the citizens? This is the question that the government tries to answer, in parts, with the creation of more administrative units especially counties while this is not even close to the answer.
First of all, in terms of funds, what is the central government’s contribution to development in places outside the capital, Juba? The answer to this question was recently disclosed, as most expected, in an article that Sudan Tribune published on 25th May, 2012 and which it sourced to a research think tank called Sudd Research Institute. The article titled “Only 16% of South Sudan’s budget reaches state governments” reveals so much, to no surprise of many, the small portion state governments receive out of the national budget. Whether this percentage is accurate or not, the truth is that the bulk of it remains in Juba not really to develop the city but to find its way to other concealed channels.
Virtually, the remaining 84% mostly goes to government employees’ salaries and welfare funds and slightly to the little development in Juba. The inequitable share of each state from the 16% of the budget follows the same fashion the central government puts on its blackboard as an example for them. As a consequence, only a small fraction of a state’s share from the 16% of the national budget goes to practical development in it while the greater part (possibly 90%) goes to state remunerations and the kinds.
Hence, at all the two levels of government there is so little, from the national budget, allotted to development that talk of taking towns to the people will remain nothing better than the poor man’s castles. To add an injury to the wound, corruption from all angles such as by actors coming in through creation of more counties, more ministerial and other similar posts deemed as the first and fast approach to the concept of rural-to-urban transformation is dealing a real death blow to development. This is because the steps in pursuit to take towns to the people are logically wrong as they culminate in apportioning too little percentage of the national budget to development. This implies that any options that should be pursued must enhance increase of developmental funds percentage while reducing, at the same time, the percentage of government non-public gain spending (salaries, allowances, posh cars, name it) not the other way round lest real development is a must-achieved goal.
Share and utilization of the national cake are, at present, very imprecise. Take a look, for example, at the demographic and administrative information on some selected states as follows. In Western Bahr el Ghazal state, which has too small number of counties despite its big size, there are more bomas in a payam than can be found in other payams of any of all the other states I have knowledge about so far. There are payams with as many as 16 – 23 bomas although most of these, perhaps due to no budget, lack boma administrators. This contrasts remarkably with other counties like Gogrial West and Gogrial East where most payams consists of two bomas each. Here one would postulate that the big number of payams or bomas per county in a state such as Western Bahr el Ghazal cancels the unfairness in the small number of counties it has. However, the quality of privileges and rights allocated to a state at county and payam/boma levels is not the same. Also as it has been the case, political representation in, most if not all forms, is influenced nobly by the number of counties a state has, hence creating inequality and bitterness.
The population factor has been signalled as a tool for portioning a state into counties and counties into payams and so on but is hardly reflected in our current administrative setup. (a) Western Bahr el Ghazal has a population of 333,431 people whereas Unity state has 585,801 people. The former, however, is by far greater than the latter (more than double) in geographical size while the two states have three and nine counties respectively. (b) Warrap state, in another instance, is populated with 920,045 people (Abyei with 52,883 people is excluded) and is relatively the same in size with Unity state. It has six counties excluding Abyei. (c) Eastern Equatoria and Upper Nile states are homes to 906,126 and 964,353 people respectively. The two states are roughly the same in size but the former is slightly greater than the latter by over 4,700km² according to GoSS estimates and have eight and twelve counties respectively. All the population data sourced to 2008 Sudan 5th Population and Housing Census whose results, though, were strongly disputed by GoSS but has had no choice except to base the country’s political representation and allied shares on them.
In (a) above, therefore, one would think that Unity has six counties more than Western Bahr el Ghazal by virtue of its population size not geographical size. This criterion will not hold waters if applied in (b) where Warrap has a bigger population but less number of counties than Unity although the two states are nearly equal in area. The same vagueness of criteria exists in (c) where the difference in counties’ numbers is too great to be supported by the small difference in population sizes keeping away the area factor that may put Eastern Equatoria at a greater numerical value. This astonishes then as to what criteria were/are applied, in the creation of counties, if population and area factors don’t support the available administrative units’ statistics in most states. Some may argue that something, from the politicians’ side, somewhere must be fishy about all this baffling manner of creation of counties and constituencies. Others may reason that there was no proper system in place at the time of establishment of the current counties. Whatever the logic might be, one striking anomaly is greater imbalance that exists in disaggregation of the administrative units which in turn influences the socioeconomic and political shares of some of the ten states. This is not only incorrect but also bias.
As such it would serve the best interest of the nation if a proper system is set up first before rushing to the creation of more counties or even states as others are now advocating for. Precisely, more accurate demographic/population data must be collected and existing state areas well mapped first. This will ensure proper utilization of population and area as the cardinal criteria in creating counties, payams and bomas in a state. For instance, if a state has a small population that gives rise to four counties as per the population factor but is too big to be provided services by the four counties, the area factor should then be employed. This is because if each county is to have, for example, two secondary schools and three health centers supported by the government and are at a two day (24 hour) footing distance for most people in that county, then it would be fair to either create more counties/payams/bomas or provide more secondary schools and health centers in that county so as to bring services closer to the people. Nonetheless, providing more services closer to the people would meet the demand better than creating more administrative units.
As if the above illustrations are not enough, let’s take a hypothesis of a county X whose population and area qualified it to be divided into four smaller counties A, B, C and D. Assuming that this county initially received twenty million South Sudanese pounds as the greatest county’s share from the state annual budget, which is shared between the state counties based on population. Suppose that five million pounds (a quarter) of this amount go to staff’s salaries and allowances while the remnant goes to infrastructural development (construction of schools and health facilities). After the division, suppose that the budget for the greater county – now four counties – was increased to twenty-five million pounds and has to be divided amongst the four counties in accordance to their population ratios. This time, the budgeted amount for staff’s salaries and allowances for each of the newly formed smaller counties remained the same (five million pounds) as when the greater county was still one.
Now, to understand what remains for real development in the four sister counties, twenty million pounds for salaries and allowances of all the counties is subtracted from the overall share, twenty-five million. This leaves five million for public infrastructural development in all the four counties or 1.25 million for each. Keeping the rate of corruption constant in all the four counties, the net portion of the budget for real development will be less than 1.25 million as part of it can miss being lost through corruption. This implies that the division of the county into more counties did not only fail to efficiently and effectively serve the purpose of taking development (towns and services) to the people but also worsened the efficiency and effectiveness in achieving that purpose. Instead, individuals are favored at the expense of the public majority as the motives translate into corruption and manipulative political representation dubbed jobs creation.
Thus, it is many services that the people need more than many counties and this is possible without necessarily partitioning counties. If seventy thousand people for instance, is the minimum requirement to form a county and owing to the fact that the population keeps on growing, for how long shall we continue to break up the counties just because the county population quadruples or is eight times the minimum requirement? There are a number of countries in the world that can be learnt from. Others have larger states and counties with higher populations than we have but have been running as such units for decades/centuries.
At a net weight ultimately, like many other citizens, I am of the view that an appropriate, necessary and objective creation of more counties a little while later when the time and criteria/system are right is not bad. But the timing and the objective of the current proposed creation of more counties are definitely lacking suitability and logic just as was the case when the existing counties were formed. A well established system such as explained above and which accommodates other substantive and essentially relevant factors besides population and area should be a prerequisite to the creation of more administrative units now and in the future. Only if these are subtly taken care of and good lessons drawn from other countries shall South Sudan achieve equitable share of power and national cake that will yield us nearly equal development and access to resultant social services. Short of that, this haste will certainly make waste either for a short, a long run or both.
Government can create hundreds of high political posts (ministerial, MPs and the likes) and millions of local administrators (commissioners, payam administrators, etc) as its actors wish. But, this concept of creation of more counties as a means of providing jobs to the masses is nothing less than political myopia and delusion unless the manner and motives are changed and due care given as well to the present rampant corruption and appalling, a falling economy. The acid test of this unreasonably big size of government is the current dwindling economy after the oil production shut down.
If more schools and health centers with their respective staff are needed in a county, for example, the number can simply be multiplied as much affordable as can be without necessarily breaking it up. More health and education staff like directors, for example, with equal grades can be employed in one county according to the service needed and can be availed. More related ministries and commissions can be merged into one and operated by fewer directors than as many ministries and commissions with multiple directors executing little but related duties. This can be one of the best ways of ensuring proper control of utilization of public resources and fighting/reducing corruption as well.
Why do we need fifteen governors and one hundred and twenty counties to fan the corruption fire when we are already burning in the corruption furnace commissioned by the ten governors and seventy-nine commissioners that we now have? Of course not leaving out the worthlessly too numerous ministers and deputy ministers (60), heads of commissions (21) and members of parliament (382) plus many other senior officials such as, among others, those in the diplomatic mission, coercive organs and judiciary; all in such a lowly populated and economically weak country as South Sudan.
As leaks have recently revealed here and there, the government now seems to value reducing its makeup in order to minimize non-essential expenses (unnecessary salaries, allowances and posh car purchases). GoSS architects have never realized this but, if no miracles happen, will soon understand and arrive to the fact that the country can actually do better with a lean government but with a well-nurtured, robust private sector. They will surely come to that someday both in talk and walk. Already, the head, President Kiir, has done that twice; firstly prior to the formation of the first government after independence and now in the austerity measures plan but with no walk taken yet on both.
Nowhere can there be an effective, service providing government whose size is inversely proportional to the economy of the country and to its population as well. It is rather the economy that should be strong enough to support a big number of government employees but not the other way round. Even such world’s giant economic powers as the USA and Russia, despite their geographical and populace sizes, have less ministerial positions than South Sudan yet they are better off and channeling in support to our supposedly-not-to-be poor Africa.
George Washington, the founding father of the USA in another instance, started with four cabinet ministers and his government was able to effectively run the country and initiated reform policies that enabled bring his country to where it is today! The point is that although the government is obliged to create employments for its citizens, this should be done in such a way that more jobs are provided by the private sector or government parastatals (public business companies) just as it is in the above and most other countries but not splitting states and counties which in turn enhances corruption and reduces funding for development.
In short, with the creation of more administrative units coupled with this haphazard manner and irrationality in purpose, corruption farmers are better positioned than ever to get more fields where they will sow their seeds, grow them and cull the poor majority citizens before their harvest that will never gain the country at large.
The writer works and lives in Kuajok, Warrap state and can be reached at aleumabil@hotmail.com
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