The South Sudan National Security Bureau has Lost its Moral Value and Integrity in the Eyes of the People

By Morris Mabior Awikjokdit, Nairobi, Kenya

Friday, 12 August 2022 (PW) — The mighty internal Bureau of National Security of South Sudan under the administration of Hon. Tut Gatluak and Gen. Akol Koor Kuc have lost their entrusted moral ethics, values and integrity of the institution as enshrined in the National Security Act 2014, in line with the national Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan 2011 as Amended. The whole concept of this institution is devoted exclusively to and translated into political pages, which has resulted in human abuses, the killing of innocent lives, human rights violations, abductions, kidnapping of victims, illegal arrests, and violations against humanity.

The national security institutions of the entire country turned to establish an extraordinarily Atok economic and military empire and used it as a ticket to take over leadership from Salva Kiir Mayardit. Most of the barbaric acts of national security are left unquestionable by the current regime in Juba under President Salva Kiir Mayardit. National security is a cognitive reference, an impulse for an active attitude, and objective practice, all founded on the essential values and the core principles of a nation, but in our case in South Sudan, it is the opposite because Gen. Akol Koor Kuc misplaced the task given to him by His Excellency. Gen. Salva Kiir Mayardit.

The major changes in South Sudan’s security architecture and the increased uncertainties of its security environment and phenomenology are calling for the revaluation of security concepts, from significations to effectiveness and from arguments to consequences. The national governance, seen by the classics of security studies as the only conventional guarantee of major conflicts ending, was passing from the political utopias plan to the space of realistic options, in the absence of any strong impeachments of the new world order.

In my beloved country, the significance of national security got gradually lost in this new extremely generous and inclusive type of semantics, which encouraged security meanings’ extension into unseen spaces and depths, ever since Gen. Akol Koor Kuc messed up to distinguish his military role from politics. Serving in this particular institution for over 14 years in security services, Gen. Akol Koor Kuc sees nobody above him except Tut Gatluak and God the Father in heaven.

President Kiir Mayardit is none of his business, and he is very much confident that he will take over the presidency through Tut’s influence from the Sudanese government. Moreover, security slowly became a complementary term, more like a prefix for the foundation of and a private entity meant to execute the social, economic, political and security affairs of this country. They dedicated most of their time just to bullying the president on nonsense that caused too many emotions, then adding up some quantifiable force factors that are beneficial to the people of this country.

The respectable revolutionary leaders who fought for two decades to liberate this great nation have been sidelined and those who fight them on the opposite side are true beneficiaries and decision makers for our president. Is it true that people like; Gen. Kuol Manyang Juuk, Gen. Daniel Awet Akot, Gen. Nhial Deng Nhial, Gen. Salva Mathok Gengdit, Gen. Pieng Deng Majok, Gen. Gregory Deng Kuac Aduol, Gen. Matur Chut Dhuol are abundant in what they have fought for?

Role of national security

The first instinct of national security authorities was to transfer the defining principles of national security to all these emerging sectoral security concerns. As a consequence, besides the dilution of concepts’ intrinsic traditional meanings, this phenomenon led to the continuous corrosion of the theoretical borders of national security by bringing some multiple exogenous meanings, which previously were pejorative within the elitist circle of traditionalist military strategic thinking, based on the glorious heroism acts on the battlefields. The cognitive unbalances determined by the continuous devaluation of the national security field led to the multiplication of such phenomena as the increase in security overall costs and the simultaneous decrease in national security cohesive values.

The payback was reimbursed, finally, through the significant decrease in security political discourse coherence, the excessive fragmentation of national security institution missions, and, maybe mostly, by affecting the social trust and appreciation of people who have chosen to dedicate their lives, with altruism and devotion, to the defence of national security. They were forced to rediscover the defining valences of the national security language, risking its unsuitability for the new political and social realities.

Furthermore, Gen. Akol Koor Kuc and Tut are to create new meanings for the classical definitions of national security in South Sudan to convince people that what they had previously understood was changed and that it is again as beforehand. Our national security system has lost its well-known ethics, values, and integrity in the eyes of the people of South Sudan and the entire region because of only two people who dominated the system for their own self-gains. It is amazing and pathetic indeed.

As a consequence, the security institution should start to rethink its primary roles and priorities and leave the rest to others within the system. People serving throughout this institution should have the ability to rediscover new professional cultures and profiles that seem lost or obsolete. In their minds and souls emerged a distressful dilemma: which way to go? The comeback to the old values of national security or the anticipation and forging of the new national security values? 

We are ashamed and remain a laughing stock in the region and the whole world. Akol Koor Kuc and Tut Gatluak slapped this country in the face in so many ways and in many forms. The South Sudanese people must wake up and liberate themselves from the mental slavery imposed on them by the two supreme decision makers in question. They have misled the president, and the country will go into a third war by itself again unless the president gives his attention to this call and acts by removing them.

National security values

Which are those national security values that we are trying to rediscover today, without even thinking we could understand them anymore in the depth of their inspirational significance for what, in the bygone era, our predecessors were simply calling love or human sacrifice for an ideal, uplifting through its ennobling capacity?

“The national valuables in this broad sense include current assets and national interests, as well as the sources of strength upon which our future as a nation depends.” Some values are tangible and earthy, like economic assets and natural resources; others are spiritual or intellectual, like identity reference points and sovereignty arguments. It is the urgent need to protect values such as these that legitimizes and makes essential the role of national security.”

Theoretically speaking, national identity is not such an old concept as one may think. In fact, it emerged as an admittedly created concept by the old syntagma like “national sentiment” and “national consciousness”, which came along with the national consolidation processes in the post-Westphalian era. Therefore, national identity is so profoundly subjective and can be comprehended as the common denominator of the traditions, culture, language, history, and even political behaviour of a nation.

It is the leaders’ duty, regardless of the time and space of their existence, to make national identity manifest itself throughout the communities led by substantial loyalties, intellectual solidarities, eloquent narrations, and rational allegiances. Failing in accomplishing such a mission will emerge from the contingency and identity alienation, callosity and concession, impeachment and disintegration. National identity includes the pride of being part of a nation and brings with it the feeling of responsibility for it, by freely assuming the duty to protect it throughout the entire nation. 

As a consequence, national security is deeply dependent on the intensity of the collective feeling of national identity and appears in the analysis and political discourse as some concepts, like nationalism or patriotism, sometimes the unfortunate tendencies toward ultra-nationalism or chauvinism.

State supremacy throughout the international system is one of the fundamental principles of a significant number of existing security theories and ensures the continuous increase of national security policies and strategies, regardless of the governance approaches or dominant ideologies. Sovereignty’s uniqueness conveys its protection mission’s full scope and, implicitly, its dimension in defending all statehood constitutive elements.

Individual liberties. People are the irreducible unit of analysis of the national security concept. People’s security has multiple faces, regardless of whether it is about health, statute, wealth, education, or freedom. Individual security complexity is creating numerous ambiguities, but as for the current essay, it can be assumed that the general idea accepted by a vast majority of scholars, as well as by the public, represents the feeling of safety or, in other words, the feeling of protection against perils of any kind.

Security, regardless of the extension, can be better defined if related to the threat concept. This duality allows a better understanding of the fact that the subjective feeling of safety and the objective existence of security, which is the condition free of threats, are different aspects of the same reality.

Even if some disputable indulgences appear, it can be accepted the idea that the individual has the largest openness to direct measure, comparing it with the state’s security or the international system, and, consequently, at this level of analysis, it can be established the existence of the objective dimension of security.

The author, Morris Mabior Awikjokdit, is a student in the Master’s Program, “Global Affairs and Strategic Security Studies,” and holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Diplomacy from Stanford University in South Sudan, class of 2020. He can be reached via email at morrisawikjok@yahoo.com or awikjokm@gmail.com 

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