South Sudan is ten years old. In this journey, some friends and allies walked with the country through that trajectory. The road has been smooth to a lesser extent and rough-tough to a greater extent.
It is undoubtedly true that most nations are born in a flurry of optimism, and so was South Sudan. Before the independence day on July 9th 2011, Salva Kiir promised the citizens “a just, equitable and prosperous nation”. Unshackled from its former overlords in the north, the new state was envisioned to be “united and peaceful” within three years as its founding fathers predicted.
If any nation deserved some slack, it was South Sudan. In the half-century, before the country seceded from Muslim-dominated Sudan, Southerners had known little but war, famine and enslavement.
A decade later, however, South Sudan is struggling to be equitable and prosperous. After President Kiir scoffed at those who suggested that it would “slip into civil war as soon as our flag is hoisted” in his independence-day speech, war broke out just two years later. It claimed perhaps 400,000 lives before a tenuous ceasefire in 2018.
But the blame for the country’s tragedy does not rest only on the shoulders of its leaders. The country’s Western backers, particularly in America, were ludicrously unrealistic about what a state-created from scratch, with little infrastructure or national identity, could achieve.
Such was the naivety that, in the years before independence, some American officials took to handing out Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” to warlords preparing to swap their uniforms for suits. Others took up roles advising the new government on how to woo the foreign investment that would surely follow.
The American advisers have since slunk away. One is reportedly currently running a distillery in South Carolina. Most foreign investors, after all, shy away from war-ravaged states. That South Sudan is ranked the world’s sixth-hardest place to do business by the World Bank and sits at the bottom of Transparency International’s corruption index may clinch the matter for any still wavering.
The post-independence leaders demonstrated very little to show that they were the cuddly human-rights champions imagined by the American left, nor the market-loving Friedmanites hoped for on the right as even once supportive Western officials now admit. “We veer between despair and disgust,” one was quoted to have said.
Ten years into another decade, it remained hard to find many people who are better off than they were before independence apart from the political elite. Few have seen any benefit from the country’s dwindling oil wealth. Humanitarian agencies calculate that a South Sudanese girl is more likely to die in childbirth than to complete secondary school.
But a few reasons for cautious optimism stand out. In 2018 President Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, agreed to a peace agreement that more or less ended the civil war. Machar was reinstalled as first vice-president. Yet, killing by ethnic militias continues. Four aid workers have been murdered in the past two months.
Roughly a quarter of the population is still being fed by aid agencies and 7.2 million people, more than half of the population are on the edge of famine. The peace agreement remained incomplete making the current prevailing peace fragile.
But experts say such a catastrophe could be averted. Western diplomats and regional powers hope to persuade both sides to strike a bargain whereby election losers are still granted a share of power and a federal system that seems far from implementation may pacify disgruntled minority groups.
The first ten years were tough. But the new decade could be better.