PETER ADWOK NYABA: SOUTH SUDAN: THE STATE WE SPIRE TO
12 min readThis is the preface to the second edition of “South Sudan: The State we aspire to” by Dr. Peter Adwok Nyaba, sent to us for publication by Keji-Keji Mayomism from Melbourne, Australia
July 24, 2016 (SSB) — “It was on 8 August 2005. We were leaving the burial ground – now renamed Dr. John Garang Memorial Grounds – immediately after the burial of Dr Garang’s remains. A senior member of the SPLM Leadership Council (name withheld), in a very exhausted voice, said to me “Garang was a very lucky man.” I tried to extract the meaning of these words but the man could not reply. This left me bewildered.
“How can one be lucky in death?” I thought to myself. Perhaps what my colleague meant was that Garang had not lived to watch the edifice (SPLM/A) he constructed come tumbling down like a house of cards. The sudden and tragic death of Dr Garang disorganised and disoriented the SPLM leaders. The SPLM leadership started to show cracks in its ranks even as they were still making the funeral arrangements.
Dr Garang died before achieving complete reconciliation with Gen. Salva Kiir following the fallout that was the Yei crisis. The conference fudged the matter. The two leaders acted tactically, marking time until the disaster struck. The drivers of the Yei crisis remained active, and with the death of Dr Garang, they took centre stage of the SPLM and the government of Southern Sudan. The realignment of forces inside the SPLM triggered internal contradictions.
The SPLM could have split earlier. The mutual concern for the exercise of self-determination acted as a restraint, and it worked. The SPLM second National Convention would have been a trigger of another power crisis in the SPLM. Providence did not permit it, as the agents of that crisis perished in a plane crash, quenching the small skirmishes in 2008. Thanks to Salva Kiir’s experience as a military intelligence officer and his quiet nature, it took eight-and-a-half years before the SPLM internal bomb exploded into violence on 15 December 2013.
The events of 15 December 2013 epitomise the climax of a contradiction stifled in order to maintain a semblance of unity. It is a reminder that leaving a problem undiscussed because it will divide the people merely incubates it, and it will take them by surprise one day. Nobody expected, contemplated or even foresaw the scale of the destruction that occurred following 15 December 2013. Nobody imagined that the crisis in the SPLM would emerge as a Dinka–Nuer conflict.
The political development in South Sudan vindicates that the SPLM did not exist as a functional entity separate to and different from the SPLA (Nyaba, 2000). We have therefore been lying to ourselves and to our people about the political reality in the liberation movement. The SPLM is only the man at the top and that is all. It was first Dr Garang, and when he died, Salva Kiir took over. This explains why Salva Kiir alone dismissed his Deputy Chair and the Secretary-General of the SPLM. Salva Kiir dismissed his government and nobody dared talk. Salva Kiir imposed on the SSLA as Speaker Hon. Manasseh Magok Rundial, and nobody protested when he threatened to close the August House if the members rejected his nominee. Salva Kiir emasculated every institution including the army top brass, for how could he have recruited, trained and armed a private army of three thousand men?
The SPLM did not have functional institutions, of that I convinced myself long ago. It is through the apparent absence of the SPLM that ethnic and regional lobbies occupied the political void. Some of us did not keep quiet; we spoke our minds, criticising the dysfunctionality. However, since there was no forum for airing our views, we resorted to the media, and this elicited hostility from the leadership. The SPLM top leadership, leaders, cadres and bona fide members are collectively responsible for what is happening to this young nation. We have wilfully abandoned the ideals for which our people sacrificed themselves in the wars of national liberation.
In Arusha Tanzania [1], the three SPLM factions concluded that the current crisis in South Sudan has its roots in the SPLM leadership failure and therefore only reconciliation and reunification of the SPLM will guarantee against fragmentation of South Sudan along ethnic and regional fault lines. I underline ethnic fault lines. This is because of a statement, which I have appended at the end of this book, made by the Jieng elders addressing the IGAD Heads of State and Government following their summit resolutions of 7 November 2014.
The Jieng elders acted irresponsibly by writing as if addressing a village council and assuming that Salva Kiir were a Dinka President of the Republic of South Sudan and therefore in need of their moral and political support. They forgot there were Dinka people who did not approve of the style of leadership Salva Kiir had demonstrated since 2005, which favoured his Rek people from Awiel and Warrap states. IGAD mediation is not a court of law where relatives or clan members line up behind their number. The IGAD states were brokering peace in order to bring peace and order back the country. They exposed the war-mongering attitude of these groups.
The position now taken by the Jieng elders epitomises the ethnic politics that have bedevilled South Sudan since Salva Kiir Mayardit inherited the SPLM leadership in 2005. We criticised Dr Garang’s leadership style on many occasions, but we never accused him of practising ethnic politics in the manner his successor has perfected it. The group Dr Garang had around him reflected the ethnic and regional diversity of South Sudan, and that is what can build confidence and unity among such diverse a people as the South Sudanese. President Salva Kiir, on the other hand, began in 2005 with Bahr el Ghazal elders and this has now expanded to include all the Jieng section, affirming the English saying that ‘charity begins at home.’
President Salva Kiir Mayardit rules South Sudan not through the SPLM party and the state institutions, but through a tribal lobby known as ‘Jieng Council of Elders’ drawn from the twenty-four Jieng sections in seven out of ten states in South Sudan. A cursory view of the list of these elders reveals that many of them are highly enlightened individuals, politicians and lawmakers. Some of them were part of the ‘Dinka Unity’ politics that precipitated the ‘kokora’ and the dismantling of the Southern Region in the eighties. They are indeed part of the patronage system that has informalised the state institutions and turned South Sudan into a limited liability enterprise.
I cannot believe that they have not learnt anything from that experience to the extent that they have come to support a discredited coup narrative. They have the audacity to support Salva Kiir, the president who ordered the massacre of people who elected him president. I also prefer to think that, while they categorise themselves as Jieng elders, they may represent only themselves. Oral narrative subsequent to 15 December 2013 has it that one of the Jieng elders called a former Nuer minister to inform him that they (the Jieng) had decided to fight the Nuer in Juba. This was two days before the fighting in the army headquarters, proving that the Jieng elders advised Salva Kiir in his venture.
The Dinka constitute the largest single nationality in South Sudan, but they do not constitute a majority, which in fact should be the other sixty-six nationalities combined. Being a large nationality, the Dinka should act positively to bring around them the smaller groups in the process of nation building and national cohesion. As a large nationality, they become the core around which the South Sudan nation state emerges. This is because ethnic calculus as a means of acquiring and sustaining power at the helm is untenable. It has not worked at any moment in South Sudan. The elections to the People’s Regional Assembly in 1981 led to the defeat of the group, which wanted to use ethnicity as a ladder to power. There was a positive incident in those elections when Lakes province elected a Shilluk to represent a constituency. It demonstrated how ideas, not facial marks, unite people in a political endeavour. I take solace in the fact that progressive and patriotic Jieng people have already expressed opinions distancing themselves from these self-appointed individuals.
I chose to problematise the negativities of ethnic and regional lobbies in politics in South Sudan. This occurs only in absence of unity of ideas and purpose. That is when relations in a system construct on social rather than institutional principles, procedures and rules. In this case, there is deficit in trust and confidence and people feel insecurity, making ethnicity or region a realm of security and privilege. However, in the SPLM, which spearheaded the struggle for national liberation and which united the people across ethnic and regional lines, what could be the explanation for people sliding back into their respective ethnic and regional cocoons? There must be an obvious failure.
The failure to create unity in the SPLM ranks stems from three important factors linked to the historical development of the SPLM. The lack of political ideology is a disabling factor. Ideas unite and mould the people into one organisation. They create a sense of solidarity and esprit de corps. The SPLM promotes military discipline and routine. The esprit de corps linked to the military ended with the signing of the peace agreement in 2005. This explains why the SPLA combatants (police or army) carried home their weapons to fight on the side of their clans, sections or ethnicities in the conflicts South Sudan has witnessed in Lakes, Warrap, Upper Nile and Jonglei.
The party program of action builds up the confidence and unity of purpose among the different ethnic communities. The SPLM program of action was a war of national liberation. This united the people of South Sudan across ethnic lines. The SPLM leadership envisaged liberation only in terms of combat action against the enemy. Thus, as soon as the war was over, the combatants went back to their ethnic cocoons, where they engage in the old feuds. This affirms the Sudanese saying, ‘If you want to make them brothers, set them to build a tower; but if you want to set them against each other, throw between them food.’ The NCP did exactly that when they poured huge sums of oil revenue into the government of Southern Sudan, and in six years the SPLM leadership forgot the liberation ideology.
The other important factor was the inability of the SPLM to institutionalise power, which remained personified in the name of the leader. In the absence of politicised – read ‘institutionalised’ – relations, people gravitate towards their kin for security and identity. It is very natural in such a situation that a Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, Latuka, etc., will first approach whomever he perceives comes from the same ethnicity. This is the very negation of liberation and freedom. In such a situation, which borders on oppression, some members of the same organisation consider themselves free owners, while others are only auxiliaries working for them. The social and political environment becomes segregative and hence allows the emergence of lobbies along clan, section, ethnic or regional lines as the only viable means to realise respective rights or privileges.
One of the phenomenal failures of the SPLM leadership, which contributed to state erosion, is that it permitted ethnic and clan lobbies to influence government policy and the running of state institutions. The removal of Hon. Arthur Akuen Chol from the Ministry of Finance prompted the people of Aweil to pressure Salva Kiir to appoint Kuol Athian Mawien in replacement. President Salva Kiir Mayardit acquiesced to this pressure, suggesting that he was a weak leader and had no direction. Kuol Athian’s tenure at the ministry was the worst-ever financial mismanagement experienced in South Sudan.[2]
The SPLM party members of the National Legislative Assembly organise themselves along regional lines, with state and even ethnic caucuses alongside the SPLM Parliamentary Caucus. The work of the sub-caucuses is to lobby for positions in the House Standing Committees. They have not been institutionalised and therefore have no legal existence. Nevertheless the former Hon. Speaker used these regional and ethnic caucuses to circumvent the SPLM and prevent it from taking charge of the Assembly’s business as part of its political and legislative function.
Ethnic and regional associations sprouted in schools and universities, where they have become lobbies in the corridors of power. The president, ministers and politicians have used these lobbies to garner political support. They have been sources of tension and conflict in the student unions, sometimes leading to closure of the university. The existence of ethnic and regional associations reflects the shallow political culture in South Sudan. That is to say, because their social and political horizons revolve around their primeval environment, they are unable to conceive themselves as part of the national enterprise involving other ethnic communities. The selective discrimination in ditching out government contracts in favour of traders and contractors from certain states flow from this convoluted logic.
In this second edition of South Sudan: The State we aspire to, I have revised the original text and made corrections in the language without changing the meaning or context. In Part Four, I talk briefly about the current civil war in the country just to prove what I had reiterated repeatedly, that the internal crisis in SPLM leadership was bound to plunge the country into the deepest hell on earth. This did happen, but I have covered that in another narrative published by CASAS as South Sudan: the crisis of infancy [3] in 2014.
While under house arrest in Juba before I left the country on 29 June 2014, we toyed with the idea of UN Security Council stewardship of the Republic of South Sudan. The idea was not as far-fetched as some compatriots and foreign diplomats in Juba would say. The idea of UN stewardship stemmed from the fact that the country along with its army, the SPLA, was divided along ethnic lines. National security was dominated by Dinka hailing mainly from Warrap and Aweil. But the proposal received barrages of verbal attacks from my Dinka compatriots, who had a vested interest in the situation remaining as it was for obvious reasons.
Now, the threat of external intervention came from IGAD mediation after the failure of the parties in the conflict to agree to a peaceful settlement. I have also appended the resolutions of the 28th Extraordinary Summit of the IGAD Heads of State and Government held on 7 November 2014, which the Jieng Council of Elders vehemently attacked (appendix 2).
The first anniversary of 15 December 2013 events in Juba came and passed with the civil war still raging. The IGAD-mediated peace talks had failed to produce peace in South Sudan. The violence of vengeance and counter-vengeance continued to spiral throughout the Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile states, with hundreds of thousands of our compatriots perishing unnecessarily. Many of them are buried unknown in mass graves, and we may not commemorate them.
I dedicate this second edition to their eternal memory. May the memories of the fallen victims of the post-independence violence in South Sudan inspire us to shun violence in order to build a peaceful, prosperous, civilised and democratic South Sudan and may war not raise its ugly face again in the land of South Sudan. AMEN”.- Dr. Peter Adwok Nyaba, Addis Ababa, 20 August 2015.
NB: The content and views expressed here are solely that of the Author, Dr. Peter Adwok Nyaba, not of Keji-Keji who sent the preface to be published by this website (PanLuel Wel). However, no word, clause or paragraph has been expunged or added! Keji-Keji is a concerned South Sudanese and can be reached at keji8keji90@gmail.com
The opinion expressed here is solely the view of the writer. The veracity of any claim made are the responsibility of the author, not PaanLuel Wël: South Sudanese Bloggers (SSB) website. If you want to submit an opinion article or news analysis, please email it to paanluel2011@gmail.com. SSB do reserve the right to edit material before publication. Please include your full name, email address, city and the country you are writing.
About Post Author
