President Uhuru Kenyatta with the seven detainees released to his
custody by South Sudan President Salva Kiir after addressing a press
conference at State House, Nairobi. PHOTO | PSCU
PSCU
It is hard to swing a cat in the streets of Juba without hitting an aid worker or an NGO office billboard.
Think of an international NGO and it probably has an office or an operation in South Sudan.
The United Nations Mission to South Sudan has 7,536 military personnel and is allowed to raise that number to 12,500.
There
are hundreds more civilian personnel deployed to provide food, water,
shelter and medicine to a population not fully removed from two decades
of war and a decade of tentative nation-building.
The
army of aid workers does an incredible job of saving South Sudan from
itself. South Sudan pays back by saving many in that army from
unemployment.
South Sudan, which became Africa’s
youngest nation when it declared independence in July 2011, is a product
of the resilience of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement as
well as the international community – in particular the United States,
Britain, Norway, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia – that supported the war
against the north.
Yet the fighting that broke out in
Juba in mid-December appears to have taken these allies by surprise.
That it took six weeks for a truce to be signed shows the lack of
leverage that South Sudan’s friends and allies have over the key players
in the country.
It is as if having helped South Sudan
to independence, its allies felt unwilling to help steady the ship as
it cut its moorings to the north and set sail for the deep waters of
nationhood.
Recent events call for a rethink. South
Sudan is free of Khartoum but is not independent of strongman military
rule. The political contest between President Salva Kiir and his former
deputy Riek Machar is a fight over the control of the SPLA/M and, by
extension, the country.
That it quickly transformed
into a civil war with ethnic undertones speaks to the absence of a
culture of peaceful political competition, unresolved questions of
identity, lack of accountability for historical war crimes, and an
over-militarised population.
Power in South Sudan
flows through the gun muzzle. A top priority must be to reform the SPLA
from a collection of private militia that owe their allegiance to tribe
or individual generals, into a national army.
The
current tentative steps in this direction are designed to fail: those
already in power are keen to build a ‘national’ army answerable to them;
those required to hand over their militia feel vulnerable and are
distrustful.
Demobilising fighters and building a new
national army requires external support. It also requires legitimate
leadership that is accountable to the people, not to the army or to
foreign benefactors. Such leadership would be more transparent in its
governance and would act as a vanguard for the rule of law rather than
rule by decree.
To this end South Sudan requires a
people-driven process to develop a new constitution. It also requires
the faltering south-to-south reconciliation processes reignited to unite
the country in the absence of a common external enemy.
It
is hard to see how the current impasse can be overcome without
resorting to some form of power-sharing agreement that renews the
transitional period.
Yet it is even harder to see how
the main protagonists can reconcile themselves and their communities
that appear ready to follow them into battle without the threat of
penalties like sanctions, aid cuts, or diplomatic isolation. Choices
should have consequences.
Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and
the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development have, working with the
international community, de-escalated the fighting. The hard work begins
next week with the substantive talks on the underlying political
problems of South Sudan.
The destiny of South Sudan
obviously lies in the hands of its people but those who supported the
country to independence have a moral obligation to save it from its past
and its present.
The country received support and
goodwill when Khartoum was the enemy. Now the enemy lies within. That
enemy is poor leadership and a governance deficit. That is not an
abstract problem. It has faces to it. Enough with the carrots; it is
time South Sudan’s friends and allies gave the country’s leaders some
tough love.
Mr Kalinaki is the NMG Managing Editor for Regional Content. (dkalinaki@ke.nationmedia.com &twitter: @kalinaki
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