Extend the life of TGoNU to 5 Years or it will collapse into a political quagmire (part 3)
5 min readBy David Mayen Ayarbior, Juba, South Sudan
June 5, 2016 (SSB) —- In the last two articles I argued against IGAD’s timeframe for TGoNU. If the responses I have got from some learned citizens through emails as well as from a few politicians I came across are anything to go by, it seems that many of them have seen the bigger picture I am trying to project. Most have agreed on the extension of TGoNU’s lifespan to five years instead of the currently remaining two. They also agreed that the volume of work ahead requires uninterrupted political continuity and collective leadership of the country.
Call it ‘hijacking the state by force of arms’ or whatever scientific phrase you choose for the current situation, the fact remains what it is: any change of guards in the coming few years will not be peaceful because the country is only sovereign in name. There is neither inter-state economic linkages for people to trade and know each other nor political culture of mutual tolerance which characterize interactions in most sovereign countries. We are virtually still a group of isolated tribes calling ourselves a nation-state.
Whoever argues that general Presidential elections in 2018 shall be peaceful must be delusional because he will have ignored that the bitter memories of the civil war are still fresh in our national psyche. Thus, for those who insist to effect political change of leadership in 2018 they should at least come up with another method of electing the next President apart from the western winner-take-all universal suffrage based elections. For example, let national and state assemblies, city councils, and elected delegates (say 2 thousand from each state) elect the next head of state. This is in order to some level avoid the expected tribally charged environment which characterizes universal suffrage based elections in Africa. We do know what our election charged environment looks like, don’t we?
Our country is not yet fully deserved the name nation-state. Like most post-independence African countries had been, we are a state that is aspiring to be a nation. And to be a nation, we need to speak the same language, live and trade in any part of the country by choice, travel to any part of the country and continue to feel home, and vote for any Presidential candidate of our choice because of his or her merit, rather than his or her tribe. We have not yet even started that journey of building a nation out of the sovereignty we voted to have.
Being not a fully-fledged nation-state, this comes with another inevitable burden of democratic deficit. Only states that have to some degree metamorphosed into nations could exercise peaceful universal-suffrage-based elections (one man one vote). Because for a country to exercise western democracy and embrace its mechanism of elections as a means of leadership change there are socioeconomic prerequisites that it must have. Most important of them is having a relatively educated and dominant middle class. Our middle class is neither of those, why then do we rely on their choice of candidates? Unfortunately, they need to be shepherded by the minority higher (“revolutionary”) class into nationhood.
Democracy emerged in Europe in the end of the Middle Ages (about 5th to 15th Centuries Europe) as a result of dramatic changes in their social class structures. As the landed aristocracy who relied on their connection with the kings started to give ground to a new mercantile bourgeoisie, the new middle class demanded for its own political power. It called it democracy, all power to ‘the people’ rather than to kings. That accelerated most after the industrial revolution which made the mercantile class greater in number and having an overwhelming collective bargaining power, including over state control. What path to democracy have we charted for ourselves and posterity apart from fighting the Arabs together? In the few post-independence years we have had it seems that Kwame Nkruma’s project for post-independence Ghana is also true for us. Seek you first a nation-state for the coming five years, then expect other things to be added unto you.
We now have a country called South Sudan which we must develop socio-politically and economically and that requires peaceful coexistence and civility in the manner of opposing each other’s political perspectives. That civility required in our political interaction cannot be requested through microphones, it must be built over time. As it stands, 99.9% of Nuer will vote for a fellow Nuer, the same applies to Jieng, to Bari, and the rest. Regionally, 99.9% of Equatorians will vote for a fellow Equatorian. Some think it is tribalism, yet we haven’t even been there yet. It is just a natural human disposition to embrace one’s brother or sister, which disposition could be exploited to claim electability or even majoritarian legitimacy. It is that wrong perception of the basis of political power legitimacy which is ‘the problem’ we must solve.
We have executed a resistance war successfully and admirably and that generated so much praise from the international community. We then wasted billions of dollars which could have built a country in the desert. Then, we shocked the world when we turned the guns inwards and slaughtered ourselves pitilessly. Now that we have recollected ourselves from the ashes, I strongly believe that it is time to show collective leadership and begin building roads and railways, Schools and hospitals. But not a time to plan for elections in 2018.
The time for elections will come when we have a nation-state with an educated mercantile middle class who will subconsciously resist conflict as they will have so much to loose from civil war. As it stands, those who expect to gain from war are still the most powerful and are capable of militarily hijacking the state for ransom in form of political power. Let this skewed power ratio be adjusted by the state first, then the call for elections will be logically in place.
Mayen Ayarbior has a Bachelor Degree in Economics and Political Science from Kampala International University (Uganda), Masters in International Security from JKSIS-University of Denver (USA), and Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the University of London. He is the author of “House of War (Civil War and State Failure in Africa) 2013” and currently the Press Secretary/ Spokesperson in the Office of South Sudan’s Vice President, H.E. James Wani Igga. You can reach him via his email address: mayen.ayarbior@gmail.com.
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