Can South Sudan Survive without the SPLM Party? (Part 1)
6 min readBy David Mayen Ayarbior, Juba, South Sudan
April 30, 2016 (SSB) —- The idea that a nation-state might not survive the absence of a political party sounds bizarre. Generally, to all intents and purposes, no matter how glorious a party’s position in society may be, political parties are byproducts of the specific societal dynamics which determine their existence and usefulness. They emerge, submerge, and be forced to hibernate, or even disappear due to demographic pressures which are normally beyond the control of the political parties themselves. These could be internal pressures (demographic), external pressures (international) or combinations of both.
The question whether South Sudan could survive without the SPLM was the subject of a short debate between two prominent political thinkers in the country. As Dr. Majak D’Agot (a leader in SPLM-Leaders or former FDs) made that bold assertion, be it on his usual logical platforms, a refuting response was immediately made by Dr. Lam Akol (leader of SPLM-DC). Because the issue at hand relates to over 10 million citizens who are equal stakeholders in the country’s future, in addition to its own importance as one of key unanswered questions in the currently concluded civil war (2013-2016), it warrants an imminent position in our national political narrative.
If the debate was about physics, one would definitely consider Dr. Majak’s proposition to be preposterous for it would be based on an assumption that something (a whole) could not survive losing one of its elements. Quoting Aristotle, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”- i.e. it is made up of the summation of its elements whose strength or weakness determines its shape. The sociological analogy on which Dr. Lam’s response was based is that South Sudan (the whole) is greater than the SPLM with all its factions and breakaways and all other political parties or fraternities (the parts). He (Dr. Lam) could be generally right.
However, if we ignore the laws of physics (which we sometimes do) and probe into the realm of social sciences, every hypothesis about factors of social cohesion could be true or false depending on the author’s empirical evidence. It would be a fatal error of judgment to apply (not to ignore) the laws of physics as the bases for brushing aside a proposition which relates to the very existence of a society, or be it a highly militarized nation-state as is South Sudan.
Assuming that Dr. Majak’s hypothesis is true (that South Sudan will not exist without the SPLM), the immediate following question will be whether the SPLM should work hard to make it false. He has premised his hypothesis on the fact that the country was brought to the brink of collapse as a consequence of many splits within the SPLM. It (country) is almost automatically now on the path of recovery when SPLM factions decided to converge to Juba to form a government of SPLM unity, dubbed “National Unity”. Whether that is a plausible empirical evidence or not, it must be taken with a grain of salt by the greater majority of the current generation in the lower age brackets of South Sudanese who might not share the same emotional attachment to the SPLM as Dr. Majak and Dr. Lam’s.
In fact, if true, not only has such a popular proposition in the rank and file of the SPLM/A generated mass bitterness towards the current cluster of leadership in the country since independence, it is already generating disdain towards the SPLM from the international community and genuine friends of the people of South Sudan. It logically gives credence to widespread assertions both at home and abroad, such as those summarized by John Prendergast before Congress that: “competing factions of the ruling party have hijacked the state itself and are using its institutions – along with deadly force- to finance and fortify networks aimed at self-enrichment and maintaining or acquiring power.”
Whether it is true or false, the assertion above by friends like Prendergast was long shared by many writers who viewed post-independent African states as being ruled by predatory leaders who did not develop their countries. It would be an unfortunate reality if the same could be applied to such a glorious revolutionary movement like the SPLM. If so, Dr. Majak’s proposition, which he might have made to prove the strength of a revolutionary movement in which he personally have played a leading role, could indeed be an inadvertent indictment of the very entity he sought to equate to a nation-state. But if we weigh in his intellectual sophistication, we might assume that his contention was a genuine call to his colleagues in the party leadership to work hard towards building a post-SPLM nation-state rather than being a warning to South Sudanese at large.
In the greater scheme of things, the SPLM/A, to which I and many of my generation belong/ed, is only one of many insurgencies in the territory now called the Republic of South Sudan. By no means should the movement and its leaders be so unique in the country’s historical records, save for the fact that the fruits of its/their labor proved to be INDEPENDENCE, the Holy Grail for which other generations made the ultimate sacrifice which paved the way for the SPLM to exist.
It is by fate or accident of history that Dr. John was born when he was born and took an individual choice to join his countrymen who had already started fighting invaders for many generations before him. Who in his right mind could claim that South Sudan would not exist if Dr. John Garang was not born or Bin Laden had not attacked the United States? This is by no means a sarcastic attempt to negate Dr. Majak’s logical proposition which must be given due weight given its context, or to agree with Dr. Lam’s futile attempt to brush it aside. It is an example which aims to illuminate the extent to which a child could be made malnourished and put on its death bed by the very mother who gave it independent living.
The road ahead is very bumpy for our glorious party, the SPLM. If it continues to work hard for its own glorification instead of creating the welfare state for which generations have fought, it will risk losing the very credit it rightfully claims. The current fallacious sense of ownership of South Sudan, its territory and people, must be erased for the movement’s psyche if it wants to continue ruling, indeed existing for another generation. Thus, an inevitable first step on that path is to genuinely extricate South Sudan from SPLM’s carefully woven nets and give it INDEPENDENCE.
David Mayen Ayarbior, BA Econ Poli. Science (Kampala Int’l Univ.), MA Int’l Security (JKSIS- Univ. of Denver), LLB (Univ. of London). Author of: House of War (Civil War and State Failure in Africa) 2013. mayen.ayarbior@gmail.com.
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