South Sudan: It didn�t have to come to this
| Thursday January 9, 2014 15:42
For a State, which is only two and half years old, this is really a catastrophe. The trouble for South Sudan is embedded in its constitution. When they designed their Constitution, it was left open to give the president excessive powers. For a Constitution as recent as this, these excesses should never have been given space. The Constitution was signed into law by the current president at his swearing in ceremony and was effected into law.
This Constitution was constructed at the time when John Garang was still the leader of the SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement) and he was seen as the embodiment of the struggle for independence. In actual fact, the excessive powers were targeted at him as an individual and not his office.
When drafting their constitution, the dynamic anthropological maze of the different tribal groupings was not taken into account. In South Sudan, there are a little over 60 different indigenous languages and this factor compounds the problem as ethnicity is defined by language.
Had these factors been put in place, we would not be where we are now with a raging civil war. What the South Sudanese people did was to concentrate much more in developing state capacity for the new country and in the process leaving critical aspects of tribal concern. As was the case with Botswana at independence, the president and his vice came from different tribal regions for purposes of harmonising a new democracy. However, President Salva Kiir lost it when he fired his former vice president Riek Machar.
The two come from the top most influential tribal groupings in the country and when the split happened, it was the beginning of the road to disharmony and the eventual civil war. The Nuer, from which Machar comes from felt ostracised when their man was pulled out of the seat of power and influence.
At the same time, the Dinkas, from which the president comes were insensitive enough not to raise an alarm to their man at the helm of power and warn him of the complexity he was creating by sacking his vice president. Of course, there were other ministers that were sacked at the time, but the real issues were arising from the vice presidency.
The current president of South Sudan has actually dragged his country into the prevailing turmoil. His actions from the time of dissolving the cabinet were insensitive and rather serving the narrow interest of self and his ethnic group.
The president thought he was merely realigning the constellations of power within South Sudan through his abrupt actions. It defeats my mind to understand how a president can dissolve a cabinet, which is only a few months old. The critical aspect that Kiir should have observed is the fact that they had just come out of a very long civil war of 30 years with the north. This aspect of having come out of the trenches in recent times makes resolving the current conflict a mountain of a job.
It is clear in this conflict that the terms used for the warring parties can be misleading. Sympathisers of Machar are often referred to as rebels. This may give an idea that it is a rag tag army that has just been recruited from his tribal group. In fact the military has split. Each side possesses an assortment of sophisticated weapons at the level of this young state. This is why there has been a seesaw in terms of gaining control of the oil fields in the town of Borr. The oil facilities have changed hands four times within a space of one month.
Enter Sudan! The very State that has been sponsoring insurgency in the South Sudan has now come to fight on the side of government in order to protect their country’s interests in the oil industry. Though the oil fields are in the south, the pipelines still run through the north and the sharing of income helps the two States. Sudan has been committed in the past to destabilising their new neighbor in the south by sponsoring rebel groups, but all of sudden they have turned around to fight on the side of their arch enemy.
REV. RICHARD MOLEOFE*
*Rev. Richard Moleofe is a Political and Social Commentator.