South Sudan: bright sides

After decades of brutal civil war that left about two and a half million dead, the devastated and vastly underdeveloped southern part of Sudan secured independence in 2011. The world’s youngest nation came into existence amid great challenges. Secession from Sudan marked as a major milestone and a fresh opportunity for South Sudanese, but massive state-corroding corruption, political instability within the ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), and persistent tensions with Sudan over the sharing of oil revenues left South Sudan deeply vulnerable to renewed conflict. Actually, I recognized this movement itself as one of the great challenges and revolutions that Africa is currently suffering and confronting from its political brutalism.

On December 15, 2013, tensions between factions loyal to President Salva Kiir, of the Dinka ethnic group, and those aligned with his former Vice President, Riek Machar, of theNuer ethnic group, exploded into fighting on the streets of Juba, the capital city. South Sudan’s dramatic return to war has torn communities apart and left countless thousands dead. As of September 2014, 1.8 million people were still too afraid to return to their homes.

In order to secure a durable peace, South Sudan’s warring elites need to begin to feel the consequences of their actions. Negotiations led by the East African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which includes Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda, have so far failed to yield an agreement. Although neighboring states have threatened to impose punitive measures, including asset freezes and travel bans, on individuals obstructing the peace process, deadlines have passed without action. The regional heads of state have met over a half a dozen times to discuss the situation in South Sudan, but these extraordinary summits have done little to stem the violence. Without regionally and globally enforced sanctions on key individuals and credible threat of prosecution for mass atrocities and human rights violations, the civil war looks set to intensify

Even with this hard suffering and hardships, since 2012, Sudan and the newly created South Sudan have been excluded from the index but that will change when enough data on both countries is again available. That may take another year or so. The index shows nations fluctuating in their absolute ratings, although their rank in the index is less likely to change. The countries that improved the most in the last year were Ivory Coast, Guinea, Niger, Zimbabwe and Senegal. It is quite hard to hear much about those places in the media. But the five nations that slipped the most (Egypt, Libya, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic and Mali) are in the news a lot.

Indexes like this have become increasingly common and popular, except with the leaders of those nations shown to perform the worst. Because all these indexes use data that is verifiable it is difficult for the poorly performing leaders to dismiss them out of hand. That puts pressure on the poor performers to improve, or face the wrath of a population that is better informed of why they are getting screwed. Most of the poorly performing nations are also dependent on foreign aid and these surveys because donor nations to apply pressure as well. And the most important thing is that more and more people began to having interest on African society with careful eyesight.

 

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