R-ARCSS Stalemate: Highly Expected but Sorely Unwelcome
By Zalson Khor, Juba, South Sudan
Tuesday, August 04, 2020 (PW) — The country’s last hope agreement is coming closer to a screening halt as parties to it wobbled and engaged in the throes of a knife fighting. It’s a brutal contest in which the impulse to prevail over the other side overshadows every conceivable consensus available.
A preview of an entire snaily R-ACRSS Implementation and challenges therein, is typical reminisces of 2013 crisis. The prognostications at the time were that the train will get off the rails and a freewheeling drift downhill will start in earnest, unless fueds and aggressive campaigns were scaled down and creative solutions to those pecky issues raised in the SPLM 2008 constitution are settled amicably.
For starters, it maybe necessary to delve further to highlight not just the roots of the previous stalmates we had due to inflexibility, but to show how a recurrence of situations as these require some levels of leadership this time. During the commencement of the 14th Dec 2013 SPLM National Liberation Council (NLC) meeting that became the trigger, clergies spent a large part of the evening with tearful pleas to the party’s upper echelons to reverse course and pause the NLC meeting until disputes are ironed out.
Instead those moving, gut-wrenching warnings fall by the wayside. Then in a strange twist of fate, in just under 48 hours later, South Sudan was up in flames. Anything else that follows is history. Consequently, and let me hope you have been following, even though an opportunity to break stalmate still exists today as it always been, such doesn’t usually save much when the mantra of ” my way or the high way” still rules. That ought to change.
The same hard-line sentiments resurfaced while trying to implement the 2016 ACRSS. Attempts to renegotiate instead of doing what was in the agreement resulted in the same old pervasiveness that jetted fuel into the disparities and abruptly ended the agreement in the bloody State House (J1) dogfight.
And so, it’s not surprising that today’s R-ACRSS 2018, a protege of ACRSS 2016, faces similar physical hurdles in our politically toxics and tribally charged atmosphere.
In facts, if one needs to understand this cadence more succinctly, look no further than the current deadlock between the former Incumbent TGONU and the SPLM-IO over Upper Nile gubernatorial post, in which the latter’s candidate of choice has been outrightly rebuffed by the former.
Similarly, the current allocations of states portfolios is marred by arm-twisting and will continue to consume more valuable, irretrivable time and efforts. It may even take an intervention of the RJEMEC, or IGAD as it has always been, to force our hands to act. Or more of the past Ethiopian prime minister’s indignation, probably. It begs the question if South Sudan aways needs to be told what to do in her interest? Isn’t that wilting under foreign pressures we detest?
The Reconstitution of the Revitalized National Legislative Assembly ( RNLA) missed the deadline by design, the Constitutional Review Process is not even tabled, less likely given prominence it warrants and no one knows when we shall arrive at the cusp of a troubled Security Arrangements (SA). We wouldn’t be sure about all that since the predictive time-bound metrix is, as per today’s writing, a forgone version of a previous willful refusal to act as prayed for by the suffocated masses and as required by the terms of the agreement.
Anyhow, its not a litany of past misguided judgements I’m talking about here. Let the past be gone and rest in peace with 2019, so long lessons be learned, rather, its our threadbare pretense that we represent people’s voice that I intend to bring to light. It certainly a myth. It’s just not true, because if it was, the most immediate provisions of the agreement would have been put into effect by now since people called for it.
Since the wars broke out and agreements signed twice, calls for swift actions, not political standoff across the country, tells a different story. The roles have just changed, seemingly: instead of paroding people’s voices as expected, the people’s representatives are now using people as a prime conduit to foster warmed-over fictions and disinformations pedlled as facts to justify actions.
The ITGoNU and oppositions alike, must act collectively and decisively as a single unit to protect our country from disintegrating into shameful administrative areas. For the enthusiasts hoping for a sort of glitterati status in the new ‘autonomous areas’ floated around, I have this to say for records and hoped you hear it first-hand: No matter the comfort of our villages zones, it is a cage, don’t fall for it. The liberty, freedom and greatness we all craved for, if that be the motive, lies in this nascent state we are desperately tearing down. We must rebuild it.
So let me say this one more time: The calls for attitudinal change has never been urgent quite frankly. The people whose interests are much hyped here don’t see it as such. They see a plot to keeping business as it is. To them, the only way out of this impasse is not to stay the course despite poor results, but to accept that this agreement is a compromise and the scale may not be perfectly balanced as wished.
In conclusion therefore, we have plenty of space for criticising the R-ACRSS, while at the same time, acknowledging that we have no other options, but to adhere to its spirit.
The world needs it, Holy Sea needs it, Pope Francis knelt and kissed our nation’s feet because he hopes everyone in South Sudan needs it too, perhaps with the possible exception of the few who are benefiting from this prolonged quagmire.
The author, Zalson Khor, is a concerned South Sudanese citizen who can be reached via his Email:hariekich@gmail or Phone: +211928000787
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