By Opio Jackson
President Salva Kiir has appointed Dr. Lam Akol, the leader of the National Democratic Movement (NDM), as the new Minister of Transport, replacing Madut Biar Yel yesterday.
In a separate presidential decree, Kiir also removed Gabriel Changson from his role as Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology and named Madut Biar Yel as his replacement
This new appointment of Dr. Lam Akol, marked his return to the cabinet since he resigned from government over 9 years ago as the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security.
On August 2, 2016, Dr. Akol shocked the world when he announced his resignation from the Transitional Government of National Unity (TGoNU)-the government established under the 2015 peace agreement.
Under the terms of an August 2015 peace deal, the 30 ministerial posts were split between Kiir and Machar, as well as opposition and other parties.
Lam Akol, who was then agriculture minister in Kiir’s administration and the leader of the opposition, the then Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-Democratic Change (SPLM-DC) party, spoke out on Monday against rebel leader Riek Machar, whose forces have clashed in recent weeks with government troops.
South Sudan’s influential minister and opposition figure, Akol, said “the fragile peace deal was dead and called for President Salva Kiir’s unity government to leave power.”
“There is no more peace agreement to implement in Juba,” Akol said at a news conference in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
“The only sensible way to oppose this regime, so as to restore genuine peace to our wartorn country, is to organise outside Juba.”
But, after fighting broke out again, Machar fled the capital, and Kiir appointed a replacement from Machar’s SPLM/A (IO) party, laying bare fractures within the administration and opposition.
Akol said he was working with other opposition figures so that anti-government resistance could be “consolidated”.
“Since the agreement is dead and there is no free political space in Juba, the only sensible way to oppose this regime so as to restore genuine peace … is to organise outside Juba,” he said.
Dr. Lam would then form another political party-National Democratic Movement (NDM), which would join the negotiation table in Ethiopia that resulted in the signing of the Revitalized Peace Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-RACSS).
However, in 2020, he would find himself out of the power-sharing in the established Reconstituted Transitional Government of National Unity (RTGoNU),
Akol, who is the leader of the opposition NDM, left Juba in July 2020 for the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, and returned to Juba in 2023.