President Kiir, Dr Riek Machar and the National Election That May Never Happen
By Kon Joseph Leek, Juba, South Sudan
Thursday, 13 August 2026 (PW) — South Sudan says it will finally hold elections on 22 December 2026. This is the vote we were promised back in 2011, and it has been postponed five times since. The government says the date is now locked in, legally and practically.
I don’t buy it.
Not because South Sudanese don’t want to vote. Most of us do. But because the things that would make an election credible aren’t in place. One of the major things that would make it credible is sitting in a courtroom: Dr. Riek Machar Teny-Dhurgon. Underline the word “one of the major things”
Our 2011 Constitution expected elections by 2015. Every delay since then: 2018, 2021, 2023, 2024, and now 2026, has needed a new law or a new political deal just to keep the government in power without a vote.
Then came the 2018 peace agreement, the R-ARCSS. For the transition period, this became our new constitutional framework. It laid out a clear order of things: unify the army, write a permanent constitution, count the population, redraw constituencies based on that count, and only then hold elections. What of that has been done? Almost none!
Through 2025 and into 2026, President Kiir’s cabinet pushed amendments through parliament that dropped both the census and the permanent constitution as requirements for elections. Parliament passed them. Kiir signed them in July 2026, calling it the clearing of “the legal pathway” to December.
But here’s the problem. The R-ARCSS says, in its own text, that it stands above ordinary national law and that it can only be changed if all the signatories agree, “…all the signatories.”
These amendments were passed while SPLM-IO lawmakers boycotted in protest, the opposition called it a “cover-up,” and RJMEC, the very body that was set up to monitor the agreement refused to endorse the changes. The AU, IGAD, the UN, and the US, UK, and Norway all said the same thing: you cannot rewrite this agreement without everyone at the table agreeing.
In December 2025, the National Elections Commission admitted that it could not draw new constituencies without a census. So, it fell back on the boundaries from 2010, from before independence, when we had 102 constituencies.
That means the map deciding who represents whom in 2026 is sixteen years old, drawn before a war, before mass displacement, and before these wild floods. On top of that, areas like Abyei, Ruweng, Twic, and Mayom, with shared or overlapping electoral zones, still don’t have settled boundaries, and the commissioner told the president that these disputes needed tailored urgent political decisions before voter registration could begin.
On 22 June 2026, NEC Chairperson Abednego Akok Kachuol called a press briefing, announcing that 22 December 2026 would be election day. The National Elections Act 2012, as amended in 2023, requires the Commission to announce a date at least six months in advance, and 22 June was effectively the last day it could comply with that rule.
However, much as he got that right, he still raised a few concerns: funding gaps and unresolved legal amendments, which he said continued to complicate preparations. He said that the electoral exercise needed $250 million. By his own admission, he had received only $21 million.
Prof. Akok Kachuol also stressed that the Act itself still needs to be implemented in full before the “regulations that operationalize it” can be produced. In other words, the rulebook for running the election is unfinished, and so is the money to run it.
Another point is that, by law, the voters’ register should be published six months before the election. Counting back from 22 December 2026, that six-month mark is 22 June 2026. Technically, registration could have ended before then. It’s already overdue, and would be a compromise of the Law if it the voter registration is ever announced today, tomorrow, or in the future.
Again, the 2018 agreement wasn’t signed by “SPLM” and “the opposition,” as vaguely as that sounds. The other opposition parties were insignificant in the entire process, but since there was a crisis, they were added to make them relevant. It was signed between Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, the two men whose forces fought each other from 2013 to 2018.
Machar coming back as vice president was the whole point. IThe agreement was about how thousands of his fighters and their leadership were brought inside government. If he is taken out of the picture, then you have lost both the most important coalition partner and the one thing that made the war less likely to restart.
In an interview with Jeff Koinange of Citizen TV, Kenya, President Salva talked about how unhealthy the big government and big parliament are and how unsustainable they have become. The 2018 deal gave us a government with five vice presidents and one of the world’s largest legislatures.
That made sense in 2018, when the goal when every armed member wanted to feel important to be called “honourable”. It makes no sense now; with an economy this broke.
Kiir has said openly that elections are the way to “downsize the legislature.” His argument is more about the budget than democracy. And it tells you what problem he’s actually trying to solve: How do we get rid of all these fake honourables and stop paying for them?
If the NEC can pull off the elections by December, with the opposition divided and partly jailed, under these security uncertainties across the country, and with guarantors saying there is no consensus, then Kiir’s easiest option may not be to force a flawed election.
It’s to go back to Machar directly, the way he always has at every past crisis, and cut a new deal: release Machar, dissolve the current government and parliament and rebuild a smaller government around the two of them as president and vice president, with parliament built on the old 2010 membership instead of a costly new election that nobody trusts.
That would be an option the guarantors would be more likely to trust. It would let Kiir solve his budget problem without risking an actual contest that might push the country into another crisis.
This is not some kind of fix. It wouldn’t honour the 2018 agreement, but it would be a second unilateral rewrite of it, this time by both principals together.
I know the peace guarantors will not support it because It leaves out the Tumaini holdout groups, the SSOA, and the many South Sudanese who don’t belong to either SPLM faction. And it would almost certainly look, at home and abroad, like the two most powerful men in the country simply carving it up between themselves rather than opening it up, which was the entire point of the 2018 deal.
But it’s a better option than the big poor government and forced elections, which I believe is a cunning game-play which will never happen. This also solved Kiir’s money problem and his grip on power, and Machar’s freedom and return to power and influence.
Whether it should happen, and whether the region would let it, is a different question. And I don’t think the honest answer to that one is yes.
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