Lack of funds is delaying the start of the screening of the Necessary Unified Forces in the training centres, says Joint Defense Board.

The graduation of the unified forces was scheduled for the first week of November, however, the forces cannot be graduated before they are screened.

Early this month, the Joint Defence Board had resolved to form a team that would start the screening of the Necessary Unified Forces for graduation.

When contacted yesterday, the SSPDF Spokesperson, who is a member of JDB, Maj Gen Lul Ruai Koang, said the team was already formed last week but was only waiting for the funds to be dispatched to Bahr el- Ghazal, Equatoria, and Upper Nile regions.

He said the three groups of the military team were on standby to go to the training centres for the exercise as soon as they receive the fund.

“The Joint Defence Board Secretariat has been following with Chairperson of the Pre-Transitional Committee Tut Gatluak for the necessary resources needed for the team to be dispatched. So that this what we are waiting for now,” Maj Gen. Lul said in a telephone interview with The City Review yesterday. 

Plans finished

“Now we are prioritising the issue of screening. We want to go to screen the forces and we organised them in military formation and when we are done with that the graduation will follow,” he added.

However, the army spokesperson said it was not clear when exactly the money would be released to beat the timeframe for the graduation of Necessary Unified Forces [NUF].

In their previous meeting, JDB said any officer who had quit the training centres due to some reasons should report back as soon as possible for screening. They also agreed that the SSPDF was to preposition the necessary logistics required to facilitate the smooth running of the screening exercise.

The team agreed on the screening to take four weeks from the first week of October and the forces were supposed to graduate on the first week of November. However, the month is almost ending and the screening exercise had not been begun.

The government has on several occasions blamed the financial constraints and the continued United Nations Security Council’s arms embargo on South Sudan for the delay in the graduation of the necessary unified forces.

Pending areas

About 80 per cent of the agreement is yet to be implemented. The critical provisions remain pending and they include the Chapter Two of the Permanent Ceasefire and Transitional Security Arrangements such as the training, graduation, and redeployment of 83, 000 necessary unified forces.

The formation of the joint command remains pending with parties disagreeing over forces contribution ratio. While the incumbent government wants a 60:40 per cent ratio, the opposition groups demanded 50:50 per cent, resulting in a deadlock.

Last month, the Chairperson of the National Transitional Committee, Tut Gatluak said signatories to the peace agreement decided on the graduation of the first batch of the necessary unified forces which was supposed to take place this month before being extended to November next month.  

Over 50, 000 joint forces of the government and opposition groups have been under training at various centres across the country since 2019 and were yet to be graduated.

These forces were expected to be graduated to form the first batch of the 83, 000 necessary unified forces as provided for in Chapter Two of the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in the South Sudan (R-ARCSS) by 2020.

According to the Chapter Two of the revitalised peace agreement, the process of registration, screening, training, and redeploying of 83, 000 necessary unified forces were to be completed before the end of the transitional period, comes 2022.

However, parties are now left with less than a year to complete tasks that they have failed to accomplish in more than two years since the start of the formation of the coalition government in February 2019.