The youth in South Sudan have no people-centered mentorship. As things stand now, they have been introduced to development-retarding systems of self-enrichment. The system is tribalist, militarist, elitist, and neo-patrimonial.
This is paucity of leadership. In The Trouble With Nigeria, Chinua Achebe noted aptly that:
"The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability ofits leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership."
What Achebe said of Nigeria is also true of South Sudan today. But South Sudan has excellent leaders, or potentially excellent leaders.
The main challenge is that these leaders are not given the chance to show what they can do. Some have been fenced off completely from government positions. Others have been decreed into offices and then removed without enough time to operationalize their institutional agenda.
The problem in South Sudan, therefore, is the system.
As I have stressed, and I have discussed this extensively with guests on KuirthiyTV, the problem in South Sudan is not lack of capacity, necessarily. The problem is lack of an institutional set-up that can make South Sudanese with skills show what they can provide in the context of state-building. Lack of capacity is a short-term problem.
A state that is serious about development and provision of services to the its people can make use of human capital within and outside the country. Provisionally, the government can hire experts from foreign countries to help with capacity building until the local work force is able to take over successfully and efficiently.
So capacity isn't the main problem. The paucity of leadership is the main problem.
Those in charge of decision-making in the country see those with skills as threats. Governance and leadership has become about what the elite can get not how the country and her people can benefit.
This attitude has made vital institutions that make the country functional in the interest of the people virtually useless in South Sudan. The media is basically toothless. The parliament is either the president's rubber stamp, or it utterly ineffectual. The security sector has become a military wing of the ruling party, SPLM. It's political. And in some cases, it becomes tribalized.
Such a system feeds avariciously on neo-patrimonialism and elitist reciprocity. Outside this system, no one matters. You either support this system or you look away from their entrenched siphoning of resources.
It is therefore unnecessary for decision-makers to employ people with effective skills and a good moral compass; those who cannot give in to graft and corruption to advance their political and economic future.
Good leaders are disruptive to graft systems and neo-patrimonialism. What President Kiir rationalizes as a search for the right person to fix the failure of the economy in South Sudan is rather a rejection of potential system disruptors.
The problem in South Sudan is not only self-inflicted; it continues to be exacerbated by the very leaders who created it.
What is tragic is that those who created this crisis do not suffer the consequences of their decisions, or indecisions. There is therefore no incentives for them to fix the economy, security and ethnic relations for South Sudan to prosper.
The youth and the younger generation are therefore being introduced to a culture that will make changing the trajectory of development nearly impossible.
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Kuir ë Garang (PhD) is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee.
