South Sudanese Youth Complicity in their Systemic Marginality

Top: Dr. Peter Biar Ajak (left) and President Salva Kiir (right)

Below: Minister of Petroleum, Mr. Puot K. Chol (left) and late Mr. Kerubino Wol (right)

In South Sudan, the youth is marginalized and confused. These are obvious realities to South Sudanese at home and abroad. The reason for this confusion and marginality is, however, not so apparent. We may fault culturally inspired political ageism. But that is easy.

So, making sense of how political ageism marginalizes the youth needs more than the proposition that ageism is to blame. The youth themselves enable the system that keeps them at the margin of power and decision-making in the country.

Of course, the structural dynamics of youth economic and political marginality, which is outside youth control, is not something I downplay. The youth are, however, not helpless bystanders in the ageism power matrix. They are complicit as pawns of the elite and ethnic chauvinists.

The youth, who are ethnic chauvinists or wannabe-elite make political ageism effective and marginalizing. These youth do not mind septuagenarians or octogenarians monopolizing politics and economics if these youth join, or are favored by, the political and economic elite.  South Sudanese scholar, Majak D’Agoot, has referred to this youth-marginalizing South Sudanese elite as the “gun class.”

An Analysis of the land issue in the Equatorias

In this case the youth support the gun class, however incompetent and corrupt, because these leaders come from their tribe.  They complain that the older generation is not giving the youth a share of power. However, these marginalized youth support leaders who tell 40-year-olds that they are “leaders of tomorrow.”  For instance, some local youth associations in South Sudan are headed by “youth” in their mid-40s. This is why, on April 17, 2023, Daniel Mwaka, a South Sudanese youth leader, suggested that the youth age bracket in South Sudan be delimited at 35.

Sovereignty as Responsibility

 

Sovereignty as responsibility

"My house is still under water. There are a lot of snakes and reptiles. The place is still a river; it's no longer a home. So how can I go back." Nyawal Makuei speaking to Aljazeera.

This, as you may have noticed from Nyawal's recollection about her state of despair, is about state responsibility to its citizens. 

In 1996, Dr. Francis Mading Deng, who was the United Nations Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide between May 29^th, 2007 and July 17, 2012, published a book, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa, with Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, Donald Rothchild, and I. William Zartman through The Brookings Institution. 

So, what is sovereignty as responsibility? Here is Dr. Francis Mading Deng explaining what sovereignty as responsibility is.

Dr. Francis Mading Deng. 
Photo: Sudan Tribune

Dr. Francis Mading Deng: 

"The idea was to tell governments,  I realize this is an internal matter; it falls under your sovereignty. I'm respectful of your sovereignty, but I don't see sovereignty as a negative concept. I see it as a positive concept of a state responsibility for its people. If needs be with the help of the international community." 

So, what does this mean in the context of the South Sudanese state and its responsibility to its citizens? Did the South Sudanese government and its leaders consider sovereignty as responsibility, or have they rationalized it as power to intimidate civilians, enrich themselves with state resources, and terrorize critics however factually accurate these critics are regarding the situation.

To answer this question, let’s go back July 2011. What did South Sudanese leaders think and what did citizens feel? Here’s a glimpse. 

Aljazeera Report: 

"A nation is born, a symbol of sovereignty and identity flies for the first time. It's seen in South Sudan as nothing less than electric. Hundred of thousands of people converge in Juba, the world's newest capital city. They celebrated their long-waited independence marked by two civil wars over five decades, and countless lives lost."

The people were, understandably, ecstatic!  For the leaders, at the time, understood the challenge they face. But they promised to lead, provide for the citizens and prove South Sudanese, distractors, according to President Kiir, wrong. 

South Sudan's President, Salva Kiir Mayardit.

Here is President Kiir on July 9^th, 2011.

“My Dear compatriots South Sudanese, the eyes of the world are on us.

Our well-wishers including those who are now sharing with us the joy of this tremendous event will be watching closely to see if our very first steps in nationhood are steady and confident. They will surely want to see us as a worthwhile member of the international community by shunning policies that may draw us into confrontation with others.

They will be happy to see us succeed economically and want us to enjoy political stability. What this means is that the responsibilities of South Sudan will now be accentuated more than ever before, requiring that we rise to the challenge accordingly. It is my ardent belief that you are aware that our detractors have already written us off, even before the proclamation of our independence. They say we will slip into civil war as soon as our flag is hoisted. They justify that by arguing we are incapable of resolving our problems through dialogue. They charge that we are quick to revert to violence. They claim that our concept of democracy and freedom is faulty. It is incumbent upon us to prove them all wrong!”

What happened two years later is something for which I’m not going to remind you by way of explanation. Sovereignty became a quest for power rather than a responsibility to citizens.

Aljazeera's Report: 

"This used to be a road until it disappeared under water mid-last year. Now, the only way to get around in this part of South Sudan is by boats and canoes. It's the worst flood this region has seen in sixty years. In this areas, every home is abandoned. Families had no choice but to leave."  

Flood is obviously a naturally phenomenon. South Sudanese leaders did not cause it. But they have a responsibility to support civilians that have been displaced by the flood. They have failed. But that is not all. 

Here is John Kuok suffering from what President Kiir said would not happen. It seems like the distractors, sadly, have been proven right.

John Kuok, an internally displaced person, speaking to Aljazeera:

"It was no only 2013 where out colleagues and my brother were killed. Even during the struggle [against Khartoum] my brothers were also killed. So, when it repeated itself, it was horrible."

Ccontrary to President Kiir’s assurance on Independence Day: South Sudanese were “quick to revert to violence.”

However, Crises are everywhere. The main problem is their inability to solve problems, and their penchant for the abdication of state responsibility.

Here is South Sudan’s minister of information and the government spokesperson, Michael Makuei, about the challenges facing South Sudan’s peace partners regarding the integration of government and the opposition armies as stipulated in the revitalized agreement for the resolution of conflict in South Sudan.

Michael Makuei to VOA: 

"I said this agreement was never to be implemented, because, I said, the international community that supported us and gave us he assurances that. 'you sign this agreement; we will stand with you, and we will implement it with you. Just immediately after the signature, they sad back, and began to tell us, 'you implement it. You must be seen to be moving.' We asked them as said by my colleague, Stephen...we asked them to come for our support. Only very few friendly countries managed to do something for us." 

But here is Francis Mading, reminding governments about their responsibility to citizens.

"[Sovereignty as responsibility] also meant the responsibility had to be apportioned or reapportioned. Instead of depending on the supper powers, the states had to assume their responsibility for managing their situation. If they need help to call on the international community to help; and only in extreme cases where there is large suffering, massive amount of suffering and death.

There is no doubt that South Sudan still faces enormous challenges 12 years after independence. My advice to South Sudanese leaders is to prioritize the interest of citizens and regard sovereignty as responsibility bestowed on them by (1) the referendum votes; (2) the suffering of our people by fifty years of the liberation struggle, and (3) by the blood of those who died in the liberation struggle.

______________________

Kuir ë Garang

 

South Sudanese Leaders Make Oversimplified and Denigrating analyses by South Sudanese ‘Experts’ Appear Justified

" Sometimes South Sudanese leaders act and behave in a way that makes me ask: Are these people really South Sudanese? But western ‘experts’ write about South Sudan and South Sudanese people in a way that makes me stop in the middle of the article to recheck the author's name to ensure I'm not reading a Hegel or a Kant reincarnate in 2020." 

It’s a long piece; so, get your glass! Every generation in every country will tell you that they are preparing the way for the ‘next generation’, ‘future leaders’, ‘our children and grandchildren’. But I am not so sure how many actually utter these clichés for political reasons because of their public profiles and how many utter them as their moral vocations and practically address them. We don’t have to wonder much because, like Foucault and his concept of power, we should focus on the effects of what these people do rather than on what they say or what post they hold. Sadly, the Foucauldian concept, while helpful, can also be used dangerously as we will see with Alex De Waal later.

Since 2005, when the comprehensive peace agreement (CPA) was signed and the interim period started, South Sudan has been going downhill. But it is not because the SPLM leaders, who led the implementation of the agreement, were too greedy and did not care about the people of South Sudan and the land. I do think they cared about South Sudanese and I still believe they do. But there are several things to which they did not pay attention.

One: They did not know that they were against time but also against cultivation of bad political and economic practices. They naively believed ‘we have time’ to fix things after secession because most of us were assured of secession of South Sudan. But any political novice knows that entrench political cultures and economic practices become difficult to fix. It was a big blunder. As Hilde Johnson has argued in her book South Sudan: The Untold Story, SPLM leadership was more interested in making sure the referendum took place. They were not worried about putting down important institutional rudiments and protocols. It was a big, dangerous blunder.

Two: The leadership of the SPLM did not focus on transitioning from militaristic modus operandi to party politics in order to change its leadership principles and how to relate to South Sudanese citizens. Without this change, the non-conventional militarist psychology of revolutionary politics and disciplinary logic makes it difficult for politico-military leaders to understand the lucidity of consensus-based political decision making. Military leaders, even well-trained and ideologically shaped ones, find it difficult to take orders from civilian leaders.

SPLA and SPLM officials found it a bitter pill to swallow to take orders from civilian intellectuals, who did not join the war, especially those who came back from refugee camps in neighbouring countries or the diaspora returnees. Having not trained its political and military leaders to delink the army from politics and to indoctrinate them about conventional politics, South Sudan had set up politics and militarism as strange bedfellows.

 As Bishop Anthony Poggo has argued in his book, Let Us Build Today, returnees who did not join the SPLA war (even when they were part of the path-setting and the pioneering Anyanya revolutionary war) were labelled cowards or jellabas.  Because SPLA war was dominated by Jieeng and Nuer and Anyanya war was initiated and led, in most part, by Equatorian tribes, especially Lotuho, Madi and and Karo people (commonly known as ‘Bari Speakers’), this dynamic developed a tribal undertone. But it was not addressed, reminding people of the infamous kokora saga of Nimeiri and Lagu and its legacy.

Three:  During the implementation period, South Sudanese, especially those who did not join the war but fought in their own ways through education and political engagements abroad, thought South Sudan would become a model country of conventional politics of political freedom,  regulated but free economic enterprise, tribally diverse people but politically faithful to the state and respectful of their cultural and linguistic diversities.

But no! These ideas were easy to sing during the war but in practical application, they became worrisome to the military leaders and SPLM officials who felt threatened by the new political realities. Instead of seeing that the political liberation and economic liberations are two different undertakings, SPLM/SPLA started political and military schemes to protect their interests in the rapidly changing South Sudan. While they thought stealing public funds here and there and making sure one’s relatives are employed without qualifications was not a ‘big deal’, they did not know they were subverting a system in a way that would become the politico-economic culture in South Sudan.  As Peter Adwok Nyaba has argued in South Sudan: The State We Aspire To, SPLM and SPLA officials descended into ‘power politics’ as opposed to ‘liberation politics.’

Yet, they still believed they would fix the system as President Kiir said during his Independence Day speech on July 9^th, 2011.

‘Our leaders, from the most humble [sic] ranks to the highest offices in the land, have to rally behind this national call,’ President Kiir said. ‘Our leaders, be they in politics, administration, churches, and the entire civil society are collectively responsible for serving the public interest first and self last.  Those who are unwilling or unable to make the sacrifices required in the public service will not be part of this government.’ Incredibly positive and consoling; but too optimistic as it would only be empty rhetoric in the following two years and ever since.

What he and his SPLM cohorts did not know (or perhaps they were using ‘we have time’ paradigm) was that they had allowed subversion to make itself economically, politically and tribally entrenched. Changing would need creativity, strategy, and self-will. As South Sudanese economist and former government minister, Lual A. Deng, has argued in The Power of Creative Reasoning, South Sudan was through with liberation leaders now it needed development leaders. But survivalist desires had become more important than care of the state and its people.

What happened in this political and economic atmosphere, the fight to makes sense of the changes and carve oneself a place on the economic and the political sphere, became a kind of Darwinist competition not government by any civil discourse. Military leaders fell back on their military and political leaders capitalized on their affiliation with the army. Those with no army affiliation and returnees became the despised ‘other’ with their education. In such a system, you need near angels to resist corruption. I know colleagues who became seduced by this subverted system.

South Sudan became an arena of heads-knocking and interest protection. It therefore becomes easy to argue, as Alex de Waal did in When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent, that South Sudanese leaders were not interested in developing the country. This is a tempting argument if one goes by the effects of what South Sudanese did.  But this grossly oversimplifies a complex situation informed by a complex history.

“International partners erroneously assumed,’ argued de Waal, ‘that either a nascent institutional, rule-governed system existed, or that South Sudanese leaders were genuinely seeking to establish such a system, and that corruption and rent seeking were deviations from this system. This is no longer possible to believe. Good faith efforts to build institutional integrity were routinely suborned toward factional advantage and private gain.’

While de Waal has a point, especially the last sentence about faction private advantage, his argument that South Sudanese leaders were not interested in building South Sudan and that what happened was not a deviation is a morally dangerous statement. Of course, South Sudanese subverted the system and destroyed the country, but to say that they wilfully destroyed South Sudan borders on colonial historicizing and anthropological thinking (the most compromised of discipline as V. Y. Mudimbe once argued) of the Hegelian tradition that believed Africans did not know what was good for them.

South Sudanese leaders indeed had the interest of the country at heart. They just let things go out of hand to the point where politics became about political and economic survival. And because tribal allegiances largely happen by default, they become easy to activate by the gun class in such an atmosphere, which Daniel Akech Thiong refers to as ‘politics of fear.’

Because of the systemic apparatuses SPLM leaders have allowed, suspicion has run high and survivalist politics and economic machinations have made criticism of the government a deadly affair. South Sudan was destroyed by what was allowed to happened not what was maliciously intended. Essentially, South Sudan is still not beyond repair, but it has tragically ‘institutionalized’ a political, tribal and economic mindset that will take decades to remove if we are lucky to get a cadre of self-less leaders who  plan, implement and publicly account for their deeds.  

SPLM leaders have said they care about ‘jesh el amer’ (red army, a phrase inspired by the then SPLA socialist leaning) and they continue to talk about their care of the country. I do know that they care; but what matters is not what is said but what is done.

If Nyoka cannot settle freely in Ayod or Bor or Malakal without being harassed or having her brother disappear in the hands of the national security, then ‘experts’ like de Waal appear justified. If Gatluak is afraid to apply for a government post because he is afraid he is not going to get the job because of the ministry’s top officials are not from his tribe, then we will find it difficult to defend that South Sudanese leaders actually care about South Sudan. If Peter Biar Ajak is arrested, released and flees because he had called rightly for a generational leadership change or ‘exit’ in Juba, then one risks saying ‘de Waal is right.’

But no! We listen to South Sudanese leaders in places de Waal does not; we attend South Sudanese speeches in local areas de Waal does not; we have suffered in South Sudan in a way de Waal has not; and we have a historical and cultural connection that gives us an epistemological and theoretical prism de Waal cannot have however much he reads or empirically research about South Sudan. Too ethnocentric, I am, maybe! But this is an opinion article, not a scholarly one. The reader can take comfort in that.

Since I started with Foucault, I will therefore reiterate that leaders and power are about effects; but we cannot allow South Sudanese experts to forget colonial anthropology, history and philosophy and the infantilization of South Sudanese, can we? Sometimes South Sudanese leaders act and behave in a way that makes me ask: Are these people really South Sudanese? But western ‘experts’ write about South Sudan and South Sudanese people in a way that makes me stop in the middle of the article to recheck the author's name to ensure I am not reading a Hegel or a Kant reincarnate in 2020. But then someone may, like Kant argue in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, ‘this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.’

So, you can dismiss this article and go back to your beer.

 _______________________________

Kuir ë Garang is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee. Follow him on twitter @kuirthiy 

Note: You are free to republish this article, but make sure you credit The Philosophical Refugee.

South Sudan's Dr. Riek Machar Reportedly in Khartoum for "Medical Treatment"

Photo credit: gurtong.com

Following reports by the United Nations on August 17th that United Missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) has extracted South Sudan's opposition leader and former First Vice President, Riek Machar, from the South Sudan-Congolese border on humanitarian grounds, Sudanese authorities have now confirmed that Machar is Khartoum for medical treatment.

Given the volatile relations between Juba and Khartoum, it was therefore imperative for the Sudanese officials to inform Juba that their reception of Dr. Machar was purely on 'humanitarian grounds.' From the pictures being circulated on social media, it's now apparent that Machar is in a very bad  shape medically.

Dr. Machar fled Juba at the beginning of the July following the resumption of fighting between his body guards and the president's body guards. While it isn't clear what happened on July 8th, the two parties have been accusing one another of having started the fighting. Machar claims he fled Juba fearing for his life while the government claims Machar was plotting to either kill the president or stage a coup. None of both claims have been independently verified.

Soon after Machar left Juba, Taban Deng Gai, the then SPLM-IO chief negotiator, was selected by IO officials in Juba to replace Machar 'temporarily' as both the IO leader and the First Vice President (FVP) until he [Machar] returns to Juba. Given the fact that Taban has changed his rhetoric, it's not clear if Machar will ever be allowed to assume his position as the FVP.

In his new capacity as the FVP of South Sudan, Taban toured Kenya and Sudan and called for Machar to 'renounce violence' and return to South Sudan as an average South Sudanese and wait for elections in 2018.

Since the reports of Machar having been killed turned out to be untrue and Taban not likely to relinquish his position, it's not clear what will happen when Machar gets better.