South Sudan politics is beginning to move along
the customary of realpolitik. Just recently, the populace living on
the new country’s borders voiced their misgivings over land issues in the
government’s agreement with Khartoum. Their grievances appear to have been
ignored without proper explanations and the political latitude tilted towards
religion. South Sudan is now sending her first independent black Muslims to
Mecca on a presidential sanction to cast their pebbles at Kaaba al
musharraffa (the black stone), in a ritual move that will
define one of the SPLM’s premises of the New Sudan built on equality of all
races and favouring freedom of religion. As many South Sudanese do not hold any
bad feelings towards those who have fought to have their freedom of worship
recognised in the theology of colour-blindness, expectations are that the same
support the president extended to potential black sheikhs, where they must
travel to Saudi Arabia without having to go through any religious
medium, be also extended to those who fought for so long to gain reclaim the
land and oil resources within it.
Two days after the South Sudan legislative assembly
ratified nine bilateral agreements including Mile-14 in a near-unanimous vote,
the Minister of
Petroleum and Mining, Stephen Dhieu, ordered oil
companies to commence operation with immediate effect through Sudan’s oil
infrastructures. The timing could not be perfect for the petrified and
internationally cornered government of South Sudan that experienced the first-ever
peaceful demonstrations by the citizens against it. The people of Northern Bahr
el Ghazal and other citizens who disapproved of the oil agreement did not see
the security arrangement relating to Mile-14 just as a temporary pen-and-paper arrangement – as mediators would want all to believe – but in terms of land and
the legal backdrops attached to it.
Unlike the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement
(CPA) between the two Sudans – a model of accomplishment that should have been
adopted for peaceful deliberations by South Sudan’s ruling party (The SPLM)
with Sudan – which was first communicated to the citizens from grassroots to
diaspora by late Dr. John Garang - the already missed savviest negotiator and
architect of peace in the Sudans - oil agreement becomes visible to have been a
shove down the throat to the citizens. If there is anything that South Sudan
government must be credited for, it is the sincerity and easy lending of its
sensitive documentations, classified or otherwise. The nine bilateral
agreements instantaneously hit the web the moment they were signed in Addis
Ababa on the 27 September 2012 and by the time President Kiir and his mediators
arrived in Juba, the populace had already gurgled the
contents of the agreement and were waiting to hear from their face-down heroes.
When this awareness took a little longer, the Mile-14 people, Abyei people and the people of other contested areas made no concealed articulation of their fears. They demonstrated on the streets of Juba and
around South Sudan parliament amidst gunfire in the air. Inside the parliament, the president was not substantively convincing the lawmakers to make the right
decision but coerced them to ratify the agreement through his hard language and
denigration of the protesters outside the building.
But what exactly is in the security arrangement
involving Mile-14 between Sudan and South Sudan that warranted mediators and
president’s arrogance in communicating with the South Sudanese affected by the
agreement?
The agreement was actually simple and it was this simplicity that the people quickly understood. And in simple
summary, it can be stated that the security arrangement over Mile-14 deviated
from the CPA path and the essence of fighting for the land and the negotiators,
under pressure, created by admission of a problem from out of the blue thereby
subjecting the land of Dinka Malual to future legal contest. It had further
exposed and compromised the security of the people in the area who had for ages
battled for their survival singlehandedly in the hope that a future nation in
which they would be part of would not kowtow under any stress but to stand with
them.
This summary has no nonsensical legal jargons
that need consultation. It is therefore surprising that South Sudanese mediators
and the president would dare question the intellectual capability of millions who
read the document in totality and felt it was a game of oil flow but in the dubious way that will eventually haunt them.
I remember sitting a few meters from the
SPLM’s negotiating panel at Kenyatta International Conference Centre in
Nairobi, Kenya, in 2004 where Dr Garang gave a lengthy deconstruction of the
Machakos protocols and the intricate arithmetic of oil sharing. When asked
about the reason behind equal oil quota allocation in wealth-sharing agreement,
his argument was fairly simple. He urged the people to accept fifty per cent and
use their referendum vote to get the other fifty per cent. It is
therefore the leader that must have the propensity to make complex agreements
clear before adopting them in a binding agreement rather than gloating in a
manner suggestive of a reverse of an argument.
The South Sudan negotiators, including President
Kiir might have a completely different interpretation of the security
arrangement involving Mile-14. This is not a new obsession in Sudanese politics
where the truth is often absurdly entrapped in the opposite plane in order to
cause confusion, delay, suffering and domestic and international frustration. The
Comprehensive Peace Agreement, negotiated by Dr John Garang, and Ali Osman Taha, whose portfolio went to
John Garang immediately after the implementation modality went into effect,
referred to Abyei referendum participants in two words: Ngok Dinka and others.
Legal experts during the Sudanese peace talks should have known that the word
‘other’ was the only ambiguous word that any enemies would try to interpret differently.
Abyei referendum is today held hostage by the simple, yet politically loaded
term, "other." And the word is dragging the Sudans into war every minute
of every day and putting the Ngok Dinka of Abyei and "other" proper in danger of violence. It is this assigning of absurdity, double
dealing, and what Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor with a special interest
in Darfur and now the Sudans, calls a ‘moral equivalence’ that differentiates,
complicates and sets the parallels in the citizens’ understanding of the
bilateral agreement and president Kiir’s and mediators’ uncommunicated intention
of ensuring that the oil flows first.
The Sudanese and South Sudanese politicians
seem to have been misled by past colonial agreements. However, colonial and
condominium agreements in Sudan were not right. Had they been fair, there
would have been no wars? The 1924 Munroe-Wheatley agreement described by
Douglas H. Johnson in his book; When boundaries become borders: The
impact of boundary-making in Southern Sudan’s frontier zone seems to
have induced a campaign on the border between Sudan and South Sudan and with
Rizeigat copying the notoriety that Messeriya Arabs play in Abyei’s referendum
exercise. We must remember that the Munroe-Wheatley agreement initially built on
other grazing and hunting rights arrangements of the citizens between Sudan,
where Dinka Malual were subjects and Rizeigat were citizens of Darfur
Sultanate, later annexed by Sudan in 1916. In fact, and much to the chagrin of
South Sudanese who were not at ease with the current security arrangement
involving Mile-14, the book, published in 2010, has hinted on page 45 that GoSS
had earlier considered the demilitarisation of Mile-14. The predetermined
demilitarisation will, therefore, leave many to question whether recent Addis
Ababa oil agreement was pre-emptive ratification of government policy
regarding Mile-14 by the negotiators, and if so, what then was the security
guarantee for the people living in the area?
Dissimilar to the Sudanese mediators who
sometimes admit guilt and shed tears, their South Sudanese counterparts have no-nonsense in the politics of apologies. Once confronted, as was the case of Mile-14, they beat their chests in a gorilla-style show of force and swing the blame
back to the people in a new bag stamped ''lack of understanding and failure
to read the agreement.'' President Kiir had been on records where he is seen to
have taken a side in the row but took matters to a higher level. He boasted to the
demonstrators outside the national assembly for the length of time he spent
fighting for the land, which he was accused of surrendering to Sudan through the admittance of contention over it. Little was he aware that in the crowd were
SPLA veterans of the Anya-Nyas. Logically, if arrogance and wealth were to be awarded in South Sudan based on
the length of time in the service, then the lion’s share still has not found
the right consumers.
Actions of the South Sudanese government following
disagreement with Sudan over oil transit fees are indeed a conjecture that
should allow people to question the par excellence of SPLM
political negotiations skills and gun-wielding bluffs. The recent agreement
that fits a relationship of commensalism with Sudan have raised doubts among
the majority of the people, with some introspecting if late Dr Garang were to
be alive, whether he would have been threatened by a leak on the oil pipeline, his
nation’s vital artery to the point of summarily shutting it down without
arrangements in place, or whether he would, as a consequence of oil theft
during export, encourage South Sudanese, through adding more lands to the contest,
to enter a post-CPA relationship of commensalism with Sudan? Even though nobody knows
what other leaders would do in a similar situation, people still imagine that
the nation’s Legislative Assembly would do its job. but as things are, we are yet to witness its democratic independence where the power to ratify an
agreement for oil to flow has equal measure with the power to order a shutdown.
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