What if South Sudan actually holds elections in December 2024 despite all the serious concerns and against all the odds such an ambitious undertaking is bound to face?

Part 1: Lessons from 2010)

In his book The Real Politics of The Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power, Alex de Waal describes Sudanese political life as follows: “political life changes from week to week but if you come back after ten years it is exactly the same. Short term fluctuations obscure longer-term trends.” This perfectly mirrors political life in South Sudan.

In the wake of 2010 elections in South Sudan some fourteen years ago, I wrote a piece giving a snapshot of challenges brought by the political fall-out from the 2010 elections’ held a year before the pivotal referendum for secession. As I showed back then, the fall-out was indeed exacerbating the precarious peace and viability of the soon-to-be independent nation. But I also noted that this would most likely to be swept under the carpet because the country was firmly focused on the singular desire to vote for separation from Omar al Bashir’s North. In deed, the promise of a brighter future with opportunities for all “once we’re an independent country free from the shackles of our common enemy, the jalaba” was used to great effect to assuage the multitude of aggrieved losers and their supporters in the just concluded general elections. The ruling party SPLM successfully bullied the electorate to vote for unpopular candidates across the country. Many good and/or much more popular candidates were rigged out during SPLM nominations.

Here’s a summary of the major flashpoints back then:

  • Jonglei State: the late George Athor Deng and David Yau Yau (we’ll come back to him later) in Jonglei took up arms against the government alleging that SPLM rigged them out of the state’s gubernatorial and Pibor constituency elections respectively. Yau Yau would later defect to SPLA after making a deal that saw the curving out of the Greater Pibor Administrative Area within Jonglei State that remains up to today.
  • Bentiu, Unity State: SPLM’s Taban Deng Gai (currently one of the 5 vice presidents) squared off with Angelina Teny (wife of First Vice President Riek Machar and current minister for Interior) where many believe she was rigged out.
  • Juba, Central Equatoria State: SPLM’s Clement Wani Konga faced off with Ladu Gore. The latter, who hails from the Bari community, is believed to have been rigged out in favor of Wani Konga, a Mundari. Tensions were high but luckily no major violent outbreak.
  • Yambio, Western Equatoria State: SPLM’s  Jemma Nunu (current speaker of the national parliament) faced off with an independent, Bakasoro Bangasu. Bakasoro pulled off a surprise win against the SPLM. He is currently a minister in the Office of the President.

All these were either violently quashed, dismissed as Khartoum’s hirelings hellbent on taking the country back to the old days of oppression, or the aggrieved parties promised political rewards and the nation was quickly herded towards the referendum.

As the Republic of South Sudan perilously hurtles towards the December 2024 elections in the backdrop of endemic violent conflicts and woeful lack of basic preparations, it behooves me to at the very least draw parallels between then and now in an attempt to predict the aftermath. This will also hopefully shed more light on the 14 year epoch of an extremely challenging attempt at state building.

Let’s first take a snapshot of the current situation in a couple of bullet points here.

  1. The major political actors remain the same almost to a man. True, there has been re-alignments in formations, but players remain largely the same.
  2. All the current political actors in power owe their current positions to a very shaky peace deal, the 2018 R-ARCISS signed in Khartoum, which is coming to an end with the elections. There are NO guarantees that either of them will have a job in January 2025. The political duels therefore will be a do or die event from top to bottom of the ballot.
  3. Traditional conflict hotspots remain and others have come up. I estimate that regions in excess 80% of the country are potentially political hot spots which means violence is almost certain in an event as triggering and divisive as an election.
  4. The government has allowed deeply entrenched impunity and fawned a ruthless elite at the very top that oversees a system of repression of citizens who express opposing views, zero media freedom (e.g. newspapers literally have to have their publications approved by national security service (NSS) officers before they run prints, every single day), detaining and sometimes extrajudicial killing of political opponents, large scale corruption that has left public coffers almost empty with the peanuts remaining being used to pay civil servants once every 6 months, etc. This calculated immiseration of the electorate and near total obliteration of opposition is recipe for disastrous elections.
  5. The minimum standards for a free, fair and credible election do not currently exist. The freedom of assembly for the opposition and most of the public is greatly curtailed (main opposition leaders are under virtual house arrest in Juba and have not been allowed to leave the city in years); rampant insecurity means citizens may not feel safe participating, lack of constitutional courts to deal with (potentially multiple) election petitions means losers will likely resort to violence. There is also delayed voter registration followed by verification of register and no voter education yet in a country where adult literacy is about 35% (for reference, it’s 82% in neighboring Kenya), myriad of logistical challenges, lack of updated census data to guide delimitation of electoral areas and regarding population all further compound the problem.
  6. The Agreement had tasked the interim government with the work of uniting the country, reconciling communities and bringing healing. They didn’t as much as provide resources for the Peace ministry to do its work. The country is now much more divided than it was fourteen years ago or at any time in history.

This is the snapshot of how things stand as at now. Based on this plus my personal conversations with many South Sudanese, I’ll in the next part try and paint a picture of what we can expect if (and this is a big if) South Sudan actually holds elections in December 2024 as Pres Salva Kiir has vowed.