WHAT OTHERS SAY : S.Sudan could be our future, not past

Former South Sudan First Vice President-turned-rebel Riek Machar has called for an armed struggle against the government of President Salva Kiir.

The statement was issued last weekend following a meeting in Khartoum of Machar’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM-IO).

SPLM-IO signed a peace deal with South Sudan’s government in August 2015 but implementation was delayed and largely fell apart after the sides clashed in the capital in July.

The statement put paid to the hope that after Machar fled Juba in July things might calm down in a conflict that has killed over 300,000 people and displaced nearly 2 million.

There is something about the conflict in South Sudan that should tell us that in this era wars have changed and we need new thinking about how to bring peace.

When you drive on Kenya’s and Uganda’s roads you see these big expensive four-wheel drive cars with South Sudan number plates. Some belong to Kenyan and Uganda expatriates and international organisations that decamped from South Sudan once it fell off the wagon again.

But informed sources say the majority, and the very expensive ones, belong to South Sudan’s opposition figures, but mostly regime figures who have taken their children and many wives out of harm’s way.

The recent report by the investigative project The Sentry detailed how many of these South Sudanese are able to keep up this very expensive lifestyle abroad – by looting their country.

The result is something we have not witnessed before. You have a situation where regime figures and the armed opposition are living large in the same cities.

It never used to be like this. A country like Uganda had its years of rebellions, with many dissidents living in the region. It is inconceivable that they would have been driving around in $100,000 cars and buying $2 million houses in Lavington in or in Dar es Salaam where many of them lived.

The primary reason was that they didn’t have the money. What happened in South Sudan is that a section of the opposition was in a corrupt government and withdrew with their loot.

But an ideological shift that has been underway for some years in Africa, and seems to be maturing, also happened.

It is increasingly acceptable for government leaders, as we have seen even in the case of Somalia, to withdraw with a portion of their government and live openly with the trappings of office in a neighbouring country.

Even up to two decades ago, because the more highly ideological concepts of sovereignty were still deeply entrenched, that would have been considered abdication and wouldn’t stand. To the old nationalists, total control of a country’s territory was central to their view of power.

Today, a government can function perfectly, both nationally and internationally in Mogadishu, even though al-Shabaab still controls portions of the country.

This is because, internationally, the notion of qualified territorial control has also become normalised otherwise, for example, the Americans could never have been supporting governments in Baghadad and Kabul even though they didn’t dominate the rest of the countries.

For many years (and to this day), in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the government in Kinshasa exerted little control of the eastern part of the country, with opposition groups and rebel groups from countries like Rwanda and Uganda being able to function autonomously there, trading in illicit minerals, timber, and poaching.

This has impacted how peace deals are negotiated. Indeed, the negotiation of the Sudan peace process in Nairobi of the early 2000s, that led to the end of the war, and eventually the birth of an independent South Sudan, is symptomatic.

While there is still some focus on sharing power at the centre, increasingly settlements are being made to cede authority to rebel groups over the regions where they are in control. Thus the charismatic South Sudan nationalist leader John Garang became vice First Vice President of Sudan from July 2005, but president of South Sudan, until his death in a helicopter crash some weeks later.

This acceptance of a truncated territorial authority seems to be the product of the wars we fight among ourselves. When it was the European colonialists, it was “us all” against “them”, and that shaped the texture of nationalism of the time.

People like Julius Nyerere never have overseen something like the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement.