From Liberation Heroes to Opposition Figures: Gen. Deng-Wek Kuoirot and the Politics of Defection in South Sudan
“History has taught us that dictators are not talked out of power. They are forcibly walked down to the dustbin of history,” Gen. Deng-Wek Kuoirot.
By PaanLuel Wël, Juba, South Sudan
Monday, 29 December 2025 (PW) — Yesterday, 28 December 2025, Gen. Deng-Wek Kuoirot Deng-Agwek, popularly known during the liberation struggle as Deng-Moch-Arab, announced his resignation from the government and the formation of a new political and military movement, the National Uprising Movement/Army (NUM/A), aimed at dismantling the joint regime of President Kiir and Dr Riek Machar in Juba. The declaration by Gen. Deng-Wek has once again revived an old question of whether elite defections can still produce meaningful change in the South Sudanese politics.
Gen. Deng-Wek is not an ordinary defector. He belongs to the inner circle of the SPLM/A commanders who carried the war of liberation to its conclusion. After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), Gen. Deng-Wek served as Deputy Chief of Staff under Gen. James Hoth Mai. His nickname, Deng-Moch-Arab—Deng, the Arab shooter—captures both his battlefield reputation and the symbolic capital he still carries among liberation-era constituencies. His defection therefore carries both symbolic and historical weight within the SPLM/A legacy.
Nonetheless, Gen. Deng-Wek’s declaration comes in a political environment saturated with similar high-profile departures from the ruling system that promised rupture but delivered continuity. Deng-Wek’s declaration comes against the backdrop of the recent defection of Hon. Nhial Deng Nhial, another core figure of the SPLM/A revolutionary generation that fought under the late Dr John Garang de Mabior. Nhial Deng, together with Pagan Amum, Deng Alor Kuol, Yasir Arman, Steven Wondu, and others, belonged to the so-called Young Turks of the SPLM/A political wing, young political figures once seen as the intellectual and ideological backbone of the movement.
In this context, the departures of Gen. Thomas Cirillo, Gen. King Paul Malong, and now Hon. Nhial Deng Nhial and Gen. Deng-Wek, despite their towering liberation credentials, are also likely to fall short of making a meaningful dent in Salva Kiir’s entrenched system of power in South Sudan. The question, therefore, is no longer whether elite departures matter, but why they repeatedly fail, and what alternative pathway, if any, remains available to those seeking meaningful change in Salva Kiir’s South Sudan.
The Exhaustion of High-Profile Departures
Since 2013, virtually every elite route to power change has been repeatedly attempted and completely exhausted. Armed rebellion, most notably through Dr Riek Machar’s SPLM-IO, sought to dislodge the regime militarily. Despite moments of battlefield leverage and international mediation, that strategy failed to overthrow the incumbent regime. Instead, it culminated in power-sharing arrangements that reinforced, rather than dismantled, the personalised state structure in Juba.
The SPLM-FD (the “Garang Boys”) pursued a political strategy of international isolation and pressure, but that effort also collapsed. The Garang Boys comprise figures such as Pagan Amum, Deng Alor Kuol, Dr Majak Agoot, Oyai Deng Ajak, Gier Chuang Aluong, Dr. Cirino Hiteng Ofuho etc., who once constituted the “young Turks” of the SPLM’s political wing under Dr John Garang. Their strategy relied on international pressure, moral authority, and reformist credentials. That effort, too, failed to translate into domestic leverage. The FDs have mellowed and melted into Juba and the neighboring countries, bequeathing a rejuvenated President Kiir to the nation.
A third pathway involved succession from within the palace corridors, by cultivating proximity to President Kiir in the hope of inheriting power through internal realignment. From within the system, Gen. Akol Koor Kuch and businessman-turned-politician Benjamin Bol Mel eagerly pursued succession strategies by ingratiating themselves with President Kiir. Both ultimately discovered the limits of personalised systems in which proximity does not guarantee succession, and ambition without institutional protection invites neutralisation. Their downfall reinforced a simple rule of Kiir’s South Sudan in which the system tolerates loyalty, but not alternative centres of gravity.
Against this backdrop, the defections of Deng-Wek and Nhial Deng Nhial do not represent a new phase. They are best understood as the continuation of an exhausted political pattern of high-profile departures in which armed rebellion (SPLM-10), international pressure (SPLM-FDs), elite defections (Chirillo, Malong, Nhail, Deng-Wek), and palace intrigues (Akol Khor and Bol Mel) have all failed.
The Lesson of High-Profile Departures
The failure of these strategies reflects the nature of the South Sudanese state itself, which represents a personalised, extractive state without a governing project. Authority flows through individuals rather than institutions; resources are distributed through loyalty rather than performance; and power reproduces itself through lineage, proximity, and security control rather than law or competence. In such a system, defections, however dramatic, do not weaken the core. They merely rearrange the periphery. Highly decorated Generals without grassroot support, independent financing, or international connections cannot outcompete a regime that controls the security apparatus, state revenue, and international recognition.
The lesson of high-profile departures, from Malong to Cirillo, from Nhial Deng to Deng-Wek, is not that resistance is futile. It is that resistance without design reproduces the very stagnation it seeks to overcome. Meaningful change in South Sudan will not come from new uniforms, new movements, or new slogans. It will come from the slow, painful work of institutional imagination, of building systems before seizing power, of replacing liberation entitlement with administrative competence, and of transforming opposition from performance into governance-in-design.
Anything less will confirm what history has already shown, that South Sudan is not short of heroes, but desperately short of institutions.
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