The South Sudan Mess

The story of South Sudan is distressingly familiar. Save for South Africa and Ghana, on its fourth try in 1992, moulding nations in Africa is fraught with challenges that would drive the gods of ancient Greece to distraction. South Sudan was beginning its experiment with nation-building with a deck that had been marked.

Its most charismatic leader didn't live long enough to establish a clear line of succession; the mess he left for Salva Kiir and Riek Machar to clean up has proven beyond the capabilities of the two warlords. Not that he could have overcome the inherent weaknesses in the system he bequeathed his successors. He left behind a petro-dollar-fuelled quasi-dictatorship that had emulated many, if not all, the bad habits of its neighbours, including those of its partner-in-peace, The Sudan.

The most obvious is corruption. Many of the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement's leaders spent the war years in and out of Kenya and Uganda. They took back with them the lessons of which the personality cult is a vital component.They also took back the vital lesson that it pays to pay yourself after a lifetime in the bush; your people certainly will not pay you for your sacrifices.

 

Now it has come to pass that the principle bone of contention between Salva Kiir and Riek Machar is the same bone of contention that is being waved with intensity by the likes of Alfred Keter: the American-style pork-barrel politics in which it is the turn of everyone to eat. Mr Machar seems convinced that his (and, presumably, his people's) size of the eating has been at great expense. In his mind, Mr Kiir seems to wolfing down more than his agreed portion of the eating.

 

What the interlocutors from the African Union, the Inter-governmental Authority on Development and the East African Community seem to forget is that the two warlords have not been that long out of the bush from which they led their victorious militias barely ten year ago. They have at their command battle-tested, battle-hardened and experienced fighters and, crucially, commanders. It is why Mr Machar feels confident that if he holds out just a little longer he will force Mr Kiir to capitulate and grant his every extortionate demand.

 

Muriithi Mutiga, writing a few weeks ago in the Sunday Nation, captures the situation in South Sudan rather bluntly but no less accurately. Mr Kiir is the Raul Castro of South Sudan; in the shadow of the late John Garang, he is a capable side-kick but not one who was ready for prime time. Neither, sadly, is Mr Machar the Second Coming of South Sudan. He has a long and bloody history in the South Sudanese conflicts and politics. The best he can achieve is a power-sharing arrangement that assures him of a place at the high table while keeping the leading officer corps of his militias in truffles till the cows come home.

 

Presidents Kenyatta, Museveni and Kagame have an interest in a calm and peaceful South Sudan. Mr Museveni and Mr Kagame have a restless military keen to interfere in theatres of war such as the eastern DRC; a new conflagration in South Sudan, especially with the oil fields tantalizingly close to resolution, would simply push the whole region into a pit from which it might never emerge. Mr Kenyatta knows that regardless of the success of Kenya in Somalia, a new front in South Sudan is not a wise idea, especially given the long and determined experience of South Sudanese militias in asymmetric warfare. If the EAC and IGAD cannot pacify the situation and patch together an agreement that is a win-win for moth Mr Kiir and Mr Machar, and the EU or the UN Security Council get their fingers in that pie, we can kiss peace and stability in Eastern Africa for a generation to come. Every conflict in which the EU or the UNSC has involved itself in the recent 15 years has degenerated into a bloodletting of untold horror. While the African-Solutions-For-African-Problems saying sounds trite, in this case it is the only guarantee that the gnomes of the west will leave us be.