SOUTH SUDAN AT A GLANCE, CAN IT COME BACK FROM THE BRINK?

This was a long time coming. South Sudan is ripe (and has been for a while) for a civil war. The international community needs to change how it operates in South Sudan if it wants to avoid a protracted conflict. The government of South Sudan needs to be given the tools to develop the country, rather than be a passive partner, watching the influx of agencies and foreign governments do its job for it. Government decentralization will help this happen, as will capacity-building programmes at the local levels of governance. Until this occurs, the government of South Sudan will never be the legitimate representative of the people.

The politicians in Juba attempted to consolidate legitimacy for the South Sudanese Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the nascent government through ideological methods, it became clear that in the rural areas the government did not have support because of its inability to provide for the needs of the populace. The government of South Sudan lacks legitimacy, plain and simple, and this is why we are witnessing the current violence in the country.

In political theory, a regime or leader holds power through consolidating and maintaining legitimacy. The inculcation of legitimacy is probably the most effective device for regulating the flow of diffuse support in favour both of the authorities and of the regime.

The process of cultivating legitimacy and its promotion is of vital importance to the survival of any system or government. How a government or leader maintains legitimacy is in many ways up to the population. Sometimes the personality of a leader works well, other times only democratic or structural legitimacy suffices. In South Sudan the populace needs to be taken care of by the government.

While the main political party, the SPLM, focused on how it had ‘ended the war’ through an idealization of the past, this attempt at creating ideological legitimacy fell short. The people of South Sudan craved material benefits from the peace: clean water, roads, education, health care. food security.

In the end, that Achilles Heel of Africa- tribalism- has prevented a successful state from emerging. Tribalism and patrimonialism is nothing new in Africa. However, there was hope that the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) could rise above tribalism for the good of the new country. The political rhetoric and ideology of the SPLM claimed to step above these debilitating forces. In the end, tribal loyalties overtook any sense of unity that the leaders of the SPLM sought to paint through their rhetoric.

Even if this current crisis is resolved, the experiment is that South Sudan is failing. The government has failed to consolidate legitimacy because it cannot provide for the needs of the populace, and the top officials know no better than to turn to tribalism for support.

At the end of the day, the majority of the South Sudanese population feel that the government of South Sudan, and by extension the SPLM, has failed to live up to expectations. These expectations were dependent on the development of the country. This lack of eudaemonic legitimacy, and the general poor state of people’s lives, has led the South Sudanese population to rely on local politics and tribalism.