The government of South Sudan and rebels led by its former vice president, Riek Machar, are scheduled to begin a second round of negotiations on Friday. During the first round last month the parties agreed to a cease-fire, but the violence has not stopped and an agreement to end the rebellion has yet to be reached.
Yet even peace would be a partial solution, because it cannot address the underlying cause of the strife: the lack of competent institutions of governance in the fledgling republic.
The crisis began on Dec. 15, 2013, when fighting broke out within the Presidential Guards between forces loyal to the president, Salva Kiir, who belongs to the Dinka tribe, and supporters of Machar, a Nuer. Despite its ethnic facade, the struggle is a tussle over power, and it turned violent because South Sudan lacks robust institutions of mediation and governance.
South Sudan gained independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011, when its inhabitants overwhelmingly voted in favor of statehood in a referendum. That vote was made possible by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, which ended over two decades of civil war between the government of Sudan in Khartoum and rebels mainly from the south known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (S.P.L.M./A). Under the terms of the peace deal, the S.P.L.M./A was supposed to be restructured into three distinct institutions — a government, an army and a political party — ahead of the 2011 referendum.
The challenges were daunting. South Sudan, after decades of neglect under successive regimes in Khartoum, suffered widespread poverty and a dearth of both formal institutions and competent cadres to fill them. It had the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, a 15 percent adult literacy rate and no infrastructure to speak of.
John Garang de Mabior, the founder of the S.P.L.M./A, was a proponent of transforming Sudan into a secular and democratic country, as a means of addressing the grievances of people in the periphery, particularly the south. He believed that a strong southern-led party of marginalized Sudanese, in the form of a demilitarized S.P.L.M., would be the best foil to the ruling National Congress Party in Khartoum.
But Mr. Garang died soon after the 2005 peace deal was signed, thrusting his longtime deputy, Salva Kiir, to the helm. Mr. Kiir was a dedicated separatist, and he — like Mr. Machar and myself — was skeptical of Mr. Garang’s New Sudan Vision, doubting that the Arabs of the north would ever respect other groups. And so the secessionists did little to build up the S.P.L.M., and by default tribal affiliation became the main means of political organization.
With an eye on the 2011 referendum, the separatists were far more interested in turning the S.P.L.A. into a regular army and bringing about a functioning interim government for southern Sudan, with separate executive, legislative and judicial branches. An effective army would be a guarantee against aggression from the north. A competent government would be their new country’s main instrument of governance. They also hoped it would appear to the population as an antidote to the years of neglect under Khartoum.
Enormous amounts of money were spent. The budget of the government of southern Sudan averaged more than $2 billion a year in 2006-2011, thanks to a 50 percent share in southern Sudan’s total oil revenues allocated by the 2005 peace deal; 40 percent of that was earmarked for turning the S.P.L.A. into a professional army. In addition, international donors gave southern Sudan an average of $1 billion a year in developmental aid during the interim period.
Though these investments brought the region its first schools, clinics and paved roads, they did little for the effectiveness of the interim government or the new army. One culprit was the international donors’ notion of “capacity building.” When it became clear that their efforts were headed for failure because of the uniquely difficult context of South Sudan, they focused on performing discrete projects rather than improving good governance. They deployed legions of foreign technical assistants who, eager to showcase immediate results, ended up doing everything themselves, transferring little know-how to South Sudanese civil servants.
A recent evaluation by the Office of the President (to which I contributed) found enormous capacity gaps in all institutions. The government cannot deliver basic services, including security, to most citizens. South Sudan is the third-most corrupt country in the world, and it ranks fourth, after Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, on the Fund for Peace’s 2013 Failed States Index.
The S.P.L.A. has yet to become a professional military. The 2005 peace agreement called on all rebel groups to integrate either into the S.P.L.A. or the armed forces of Sudan. But several warlords rebelled continually throughout the interim period, leaving and rejoining the S.P.L.A., which reinforced their own power with their loyalists, rather than the army’s authority.
With such poor institutions, the rivalry between Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar quickly devolved a few weeks ago — apparently into a sectarian conflict. In reality, the violence is about competition for control of the S.P.L.M., which is seen as a major asset for the next election in 2015; it is still a popular brand, thanks to its part in the liberation struggle. At meetings in mid-December to discuss a new constitution, manifesto and a code of conduct for the party, Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar could not agree on rules for internal elections or the appointment of the party’s chairman. Mr. Machar and his allies walked out in frustration; within a few hours, violence erupted among the Presidential Guards.
The latest round of peace talks has raised hopes of ending the strife in South Sudan. But the negotiations are a stopgap measure at best: The institutional deficiencies that have brought about the violence remain. For both its sake and the sake of this young country, the political leadership of South Sudan must complete the task it aborted of building basic institutions of governance.
Peter Biar Ajak, founder and director of the Center for Strategic Analysis and Research in Juba and a member of the National Security Policy Drafting Committee in the Office of the President of South Sudan since 2011, is a Ph.D candidate at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.