From Liberation to Lineage: President Kiir, the Crown Princess, and the Personalization of the South Sudanese State
President Kiir and the Crown Princess Adut Salva Kiir
By PaanLuel Wël, Juba, South Sudan
Tuesday, 23 December 2025 (PW) — The French philosopher Joseph de Maistre once observed that “every nation gets the government it deserves.” That is, the government is seen as a mirror of the society it governs, reflecting its values, flaws, and priorities. Mansour Khalid’s book, “The Government They Deserve” is, in many ways, a modern African elaboration of that timeless truth. Both scholars insist that governments are not accidents for they are mirror reflections of what societies silently tolerate, unwittingly normalize, and ultimately fail to challenge.
Mansour Khalid’s The Government They Deserve offers a sharp critique of political elites who personalize state power and reproduce it within narrow circles, often at the expense of national institutions. Reading the book today, one cannot help but draw parallels with the current political reality in Salva Kiir’s South Sudan.
The public appearance of President Kiir alongside his daughter, Adut Salva Kiir Mayardit, at the National Prayer Breakfast in Juba, has fueled public debate about governance, power, and succession. Hon. Adut, popularly known as Wun-Weng, currently serves as her father’s Presidential Envoy on “Special Programs,” a role that places her firmly within the machinery of state power in a country where government is the dominant, and often the only, source of employment, influence, and survival.
This is precisely the political culture de Maistre and Khalid warned about. When citizens grow accustomed to personalized rule, the state gradually transforms into a family enterprise, where the state slowly mutates into a personal preserve, and public office becomes an extension of private lineage. Power reproduces itself not through institutions, accountability, or merit, but through proximity and lineage.
Once political authority becomes concentrated within families and personal networks, the line between state and household begins to blur. These arrangements persist not because they are uncontested, but because resistance weakens, expectations decline, aspirations evaporate, and disillusionment prevails.
As De Maistre’s dictum proclaims, nations do not merely endure their governments but actively shape them through consent, silence, and resignation. If South Sudan continues down this path, it will not be governed by coincidence or destiny, but by the cumulative consequences of what its society chose to accept as normal.
As Khalid suggests, such a society often end up with a government they rightfully deserve, one that reflects what they tolerate, normalize, or fail to challenge.
Part 2
Dr. John Garang once warned that “a poor nation reflects a poor government, and a weak people reflect a weak government.” In the context of post-independence South Sudan, that warning reads more like prophecy. What South Sudan has become since 2011 cannot be explained away by external sabotage, colonial legacies, or the familiar excuse of “baby nation.” Other post-liberation states faced similar or worse starting conditions and yet made deliberate political choices that produced relative stability and growth. South Sudan made different choices.
Salva Kiir’s South Sudan is neither Rwanda under Paul Kagame nor Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi, some of the states that traded political freedoms for order, institutional discipline, and measurable economic transformation. Whatever one thinks of their authoritarianism, Kagame and Meles governed with a clear national project, characterised by centralised authority paired with performance, state capacity, and long-term planning.
Nor is South Sudan comparable to Kenya, a flawed but functioning multiparty system marked by economic growth, private-sector vitality, and corruption that, however corrosive, coexists with institutional continuity and periodic elections. It is not Uganda under Museveni either, where political stagnation and shrinking civil liberties sit alongside relative state coherence, macroeconomic management, and security control.
And it is certainly not China, Singapore, or the Asian Tigers, some of the states that prioritised ruthless bureaucratic efficiency, investment in human capital, and disciplined nationalism to lift millions out of poverty, even at the expense of political freedoms.
South Sudan does not fit any of these models. Instead, post-independence South Sudan feels like the same monkeys in a different forest where independence changed the geography of power, and replaced Khartoum’s dominance with Juba’s predation.
Measured against that vision, Salva Kiir’s government has produced neither stability without freedom, nor growth with corruption, nor order with repression, nor prosperity with discipline. It has produced a state without direction, a government without a project, and a nation trapped in permanent transition.
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