Tribalism, or Lawlessness? How to Stop Inter-Communal Violence and Maintain Peaceful Coexistence in South Sudan

By Marial Chagai Matet, Juba, South Sudan

 Tuesday, May 26, 2020 (PW) — “He never stood a chance. His first mistake was looking for food alone; perhaps things would have turned out differently if he’d been with someone else. The second, bigger mistake was wandering too far up the valley into a dangerous wooded area. This was where he risked running into the Others, the ones from the ridge above the valley. At first, there were two of them, and he tried to fight, but another four crept up behind him and he was surrounded. They left him there to bleed to death and later returned to mutilate his body.

Eventually, nearly 20 such killings took place, until there was no one left, and the Others took over the whole valley. The protagonists in this tale of blood and conquest, first told by the primatolo- gist John Mitani, are not people; they are chimpanzees in a national park in Uganda. Over the course of a decade, the male chimps in one group systematically killed every neighboring male, kidnapped the surviving females, and expanded their territory.”

This is Your Brain on Nationalism: The Biology of Us and Them. Robert Sapolsky. The shocking face of tribalism is usually characterized by the absence of Law and Order (State Governments). Tribe A marauding and killing members of Tribe B with illegal weapons, to steal their cattle and abduct their women, and get away with it, is not very different from that scenario.

“If such is the violent reality of life as an ape, is it at all surprising that humans, who share more than 98 percent of their dna with chimps, also divide the world into “us” and “them” and go to war over these categories?” Sapolsky.

However, what makes people different from the Chimpanzees mentioned above, is the ability for humans to organize themselves in a civil manner, and lift up themselves from a state of ignorance, or state of nature, as Hobbes put it, and institute Law and Order, a constitution, as the basis of their union. The social contract.

Without this, “Hobbes argues that natural inequalities between humans are not so great as to give anyone clear superiority; and thus all must live in constant fear of loss or violence; so that “during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre as is of every man against every man”. In this state, every person has a natural right to do anything one thinks necessary for preserving one’s own life, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

“When you pay too much attention to boundaries, you don’t see the big picture. All you see are categories.” Tribes are imaginary boundaries in the modern context of the state. So why do they command so much attention and emotional attachments and reactions when tribes fight? It is because we identify with them as the basis for our identity and well-being.

When the Murle are attacking Lou Nuer, when Twic Mayardit are being attacked by the Bul Nuer, or when people who identify with each tribe become outraged when innocent people are being slaughtered. However, where is the anger being directed to? When the anger is being directed to the marauding side or tribe, this adds fuel to the problem, it is not a solution at all, what it does is encourage revenge, a loss for all sides.

So what happens when it is the same tribe killing each other, as in the case in Rumbek of Lakes State? Where is the rage pointed to? Because in the other cases it is either the Murle are bad, or Nuer are bad. The underlying problem regarding communal violence in South Sudan is not tribalism, but a lack of proper Public Administration. This is because thousands of people cannot continue to loose their lives and properties and no one is held accountable. It doesn’t have to be like this, life doesn’t have to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

The armed civilians currently causing havoc all over South Sudan, disguised as tribal war, are under what Rawls called, “a veil of ignorance”, that prevents them from knowing how they may benefit from cooperative society with their neighbours. They lack fore-knowledge of their intelligence, wealth, or abilities. Therefore, authorities need to step in and fill the gap of what Christine Cheng calls “ungoverned spaces”, whereby state institutions are absent or under-resourced, thereby lacking a state monopoly on violence.

The state needs to step in and promise the armed civilians who sometimes take the law into their own hands and sometimes rob their neighbours, that their basic liberties and properties will be protected if they give up their guns and lawless ways. They also have to be availed some economic guarantees as well.

In the end, we are all South Sudanese and what we expect from Public Administrators in relation to communal violence are:     

1. Disarmament of civilians, complete disarmament. No civilian should be armed for whatever reason. The holding of illegal firearms, which leads to cattle rustling, stealing, murder, and intimidation is a matter of law and order, not tribalism.

2. Provision of education throughout South Sudan as a means to enlighten the masses, who suffer from upwards of 70% illiteracy rates. Education will pacify the masses; it will widen their lenses beyond the categories of tribes and localities. It will allow them to be informed about the responsibilities of their state and national governments, in providing public services and security for all in order for economic activities to take place, which will in turn expand employment opportunities. 

3. Once the firearms have been collected from all the civilians, the atmosphere for education will be favourable. Investments in the education sector should be the first priority, teachers from Kenya and Tanzania as well as our own educators can be hired to teach our masses, because not everyone will afford to go and study there and the money will be spent here to develop our economy. 

4. Polytechnic centres for practical skills should be set up. The mandate of NGO’s and the UN should be changed to improve skills and capacity building for employability and not merely humanitarian work. The absence of arms and communal violence will reduce the need to depend on aid for the civil populations, as they can now engage in agriculture.

5. Political parties must come to a civil agreement on the need to peacefully practice politics. In terms of shifting their attention to policies and institutions instead of individuals, and the peaceful means of transfer of power from one official to the next in all branches of the government offices.  With each official being held accountable according to their handling of government resources, e.g. no fired official should take home their government issued vehicle, and a detailed financial report should be made available to auditors explaining what was done whilst in office.

6. The role of the representative arm of government is to ensure that all administrative areas are represented in the government through the members of parliament. Therefore, the focus on executive positions such as ministerial dockets should be the prerogative of political parties and whoever subscribes to their ideological policies, the level of their education and experience, and not which tribe the individual minister comes from, because it doesn’t matter and it will not ensure service delivery.

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