More counties in Central Equatoria

Have the CES plans to create more counties passed reality checks?

By Laila B. Lokosang

October 4, 2010 — Quite recently, Central Equatoria State (CES) Governor Clement Wani Kong’a is reported to have disclosed to Equatorians in Khartoum that the State plans to create 12 new counties. If that happens, the number of states in CES will be three times the current number!

One wonders whether Governor Wani’s ostensible motive is merely to appease some sections of Equatorians or he simply wants to pride himself as the governor with the largest number of counties and 18 commissioners reporting to him. If politics of appeasement are on stake or the decision is a result of yielding to pressure from some individuals or circles, couldn’t it be concluded that the whole thing is a ploy to create more constituencies and employment to some self-styled politicians bent to amass wealth the easy way? One also wonders whether those who advised the Governor to take this decision have considered the implications of coordinating, monitoring and communicating with all 18 counties, which require a huge state secretariat. Let me put more reality checks to the whole matter.

1. Budget funding:

It is an open secret that the budget of Central Equatoria State is in deficit from year to year. With this uneasy position, where will the additional funds come from? Has South Sudan already recovered from the recent budgetary crisis that led to some workforce downsizing? Has our CES revenue proportionally tripled in the last six months? Is there a state financial report that portrays that its economy has improved?

2. Human resources:

Eighteen counties translate to 6 plus 12 new constitutional positions of commissioners, 12 additional executive directors and 12 sets of administrative and sector professional staff: education; public health, etc.. For all we know, the current stock of personnel manning the six counties, 45 payams and 225 bomas is lacking in professional training and experience.

3. Infrastructure:

It is inevitable that some of the counties would be headquartered in areas currently disconnected from Juba, the state capital. That would create a lot of logistical hiccups. One would think that CES authorities would see the wisdom of prioritizing the building of road infrastructure before thinking of expanding administrative units.

Another inevitable challenge would be that the new 12 county headquarters would need to be built from scratch. If decreed now, it would mean that a good number of commissioners would for some years run their counties from temporary buildings such as traditional houses with thatched roofs and mudded walls. This could expose official documents to risk of fire and other forms of calamities. It would also create frustrating working conditions. As South Sudan is still suffering from lack of electricity, piped water and telecommunication facilities, the whole setting would be unattractive to the sophisticated or cosmopolitan white collar officials. The rudimentary office facilities and the deep rural county headquarters would always tempt such officials to frequent trips to towns and thus affect performance.

Faced with enormous logistical challenges, some of the new commissioners and their subordinates might resort to operating their offices from Juba for a substantial period of time, away from the county populace,. This in itself would imply huge operational and transport costs. It would also not help the local economy of the counties, as their employees instead spend their money in Juba.

4. Population and Revenue:

It is out of question that the fundamental principles of creating administrative units are grounded on population and sources of revenue. Population activities provide the basis of the economy of a locality. Population size alone can determine the size of the economy. To make this simple to understand, let us consider the example of two business concerns located in two distant areas. Surely a business located in a less populated area is disadvantaged in terms of revenue and along with that goes the volume of tax and revenue collected. Conversely, a highly populated area puts a business concern into financial advantage; vis-à-vis the economy. In planning a new county, questions should also be asked about potential sources of revenue from the rest of the economic sectors: agriculture, animal resources, industry, mining, communication, transport, forestry, fisheries and tourism. One wonders whether Central Equatoria State has undertaken any stocktaking and mapping of the state’s resources before rushing into making important decisions that have gross repercussions on the economy.

5. Planning Processes:

Without necessarily borrowing from local governance and public policy textbooks, it is paramount to consider that creating administrative units based on political decisions is counterproductive. In fact it should be based on the country’s local government policy framework. Experts of local government should be widely consulted and the processes recommended for planning further decentralization should be adhered to. Deviating from this principle, leads to conclusions that such decisions are politics of appeasement or those that border the so-called divide and rule strategies of hegemonic authorities. In fact, such decisions are paradoxical and invalidate our claim that it is the north-led regimes that are bent on implementing divide and rule policies.

6. Evaluation of Current Administrative Units:

It should not elude our memory that the Government of Southern Sudan or the State Government has to date not undertaken any performance evaluation of the six counties. Creating new counties, while it is everybody’s conclusion that a number, if not all, of these counties have performed below par, is unwarranted and, at worst, dragging the state further into administrative quandary.

Conclusion:

Given this position, one would advocate that the CES government and indeed its policy makers should make use of specialists prior to making decisions that have far reaching implications to the state and future progress of South Sudan. Already South Sudan with its 90 plus recently created counties is toiling administratively and economically. As far as I am concerned, a mistake has already been made in decreeing creation of multiple counties without carrying out any feasibility studies, assessment of resources, capacity and analysis strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A country yet to be given birth to cannot afford to carry the burden of so many administrative units. We should borrow a leaf from the historic colonial administration. The colonials started with few, sustainable and manageable administrative units based on population, which provide the tax and resources to fund the local administrative units and provide the surplus to the central government. Otherwise, we are seriously heading to effects of a bad start, which we shall live to rue for a very long time.

The author is a scholar based in South Africa. He can be reached on email: [email protected]