Two Years of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement
By Steven Wöndu
Jan 9, 2007 — It is a nice feeling to know that there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese who never witnessed our wars. They will hear it from us and read about it in books when they grow up. They still have more than ten years before they can understand and share the pain. For now they only worry about hunger, safety, and sleep; for they are still two years old or younger. They were not yet born when we signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [CPA] on January 9th 2005. On that day, millions joined Comrade Masimino Alam in shading the tears of joy. People celebrated with music, prayers, and feasts. It was a moment of triumph and elation for Southerners.
Many of us were pumped up with great expectations of a bright future; a future where for the first time, we would be in control of our land, lives and destiny. We were aware that Southern Sudan is the least developed piece of this planet. Nevertheless, we saw this as an opportunity to create a neat country; one that is free of the bottlenecks of old development experiences. We would not have the factors that misdirected development planning and trends in independent Africa for fifty years. Southern Sudan would be built from on a clean foundation. We would design our infrastructure, our civil service, our defense systems, our economic mix, our social structure and maybe our weather, to our unique taste. We would create a New Sudan based on a novel paradigm. Months before the signing of the CPA, Dr John Garang was already dreaming about wind mills, solar panels and mini-hydro plants for rural electrification. He had mapped out the priority trunk roads that would have to be completed in the first eighteen months of the formation of the Government of Southern Sudan and which would come into service after twenty four or thirty six months respectively. According to that schedule, Southern Sudan would have a reasonable road network by 2008. These ideas were subjected to scrutiny and formal modifications and adoption by a major conference held in Rumbek immediately after the signing of the CPA.
Food security was a common sense objective that had to be achieved at the shortest time possible. This was to be done through the direct empowerment of the family to expand and improve production of crops and livestock. Self sufficiency was to begin at the household level. Micro food processing and export initiatives would follow later. Mature forestry resources would be used sparingly for ‘quick impact’ interventions in our classrooms, wards and offices.
By the time of the signing of the CPA, we had already quantified the grim realities of our social sector. We knew that all the good indicators (life expectancy, literacy, average income…) were dropping and all the bad indicators (infant mortality, school girls’ drop out rate, deforestation…) were rising. Decisions were taken on targets, programs and projects to address and redress these trends. There were even time schedules for vaccinating ten thousand children, enrolling fifty thousand primary school pupils, achieving food self sufficiency in twenty counties etc. By the time we went to that pavilion to sign the CPA, we had systematically thought through the battle plan against the Malaria-TB-HIV unholy trinity. We had figured out how to approach tertiary education and capacity building.
Everyone was aware that the main obstacle to rapid delivery of the peace dividend and socio-economic development would be lack of resources. However, there were the twin blessings of a sympathetic donor world and our own share of national oil revenue. As it turned out the Oslo donor conference of June 2005 pledged 4.5 billion dollars. Our share of oil revenue would finance the recurrent budget and agriculture, while donor funds would be devoted solely to physical and human resources development. In the words of John Garang, we were going to use the oil revenue to literally fuel agriculture; the one economic sector in which all the people are involved in one way or the other. The policy objective is to circumvent the tendency of oil dependent economies of creating a small super-rich elite and a vast poor majority. There was also a plan to attract an inflow of private sector direct investment, especially in the mining and agricultural sectors. By the time we went to the process of ratifying the CPA and drafting the interim national constitution, we already had a fair idea of what we were going to do with our new responsibility and opportunity. We thought we knew what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We also thought we had the means we needed to deliver the promise.
But there were also hidden worries. At the back of everyone’s mind was the suspicion that the peace might not last. The Thomas in us was still skeptical. Was this CPA in our hands the TRUE agreement “those people” signed or was there something in there we could not see? If this is all true, what capabilities do the enemies of peace have and what sabotage plots might be in the cooking. Was the Agreement a manifestation of the parties’ strategic decision to end the war or was it a tactical maneuver to buy time and resume the fight when circumstances ‘improved’? Another set of worries, and arguably more frightening, was our fear of our selves. Would we, with our myriad of constellations of tribal militias and politicians allow the dust to settle before getting on each others’ throats? How will an administration composed of combatants with command experience, bureaucrats with play-safe experience, and returnees with desk-top experience run a government?
While we were spinning in this confused state of joy, crying, celebration, worrying and fearing, our head fell off. On July 30th or 29th 2005 John Garang was one of thirteen or fourteen passengers and crew who perished in a helicopter accident (we are told). He was our leader, chief dreamer and schemer. He was the embodiment of our course and aspirations. We regarded him as the guardian of our achievement, peace and freedom. His sudden departure threw our hopes asunder. Even the children and citizens who never saw him knew him, loved him, trusted him, and believed in him. The cruel death of John Garang aggravated our worst fears. The way he died exacerbated our fear of vulnerability. It showed that the CPA was no longer a panacea. In anger and despair, some of us lamented that our God was either an unreliable powerless ally, or had a cynical sense of humor! But fate was kinder to us than we dreaded. We could not get John Garang back but his legacy would be preserved, his mission would continue. The mantle of John Garang passed to his long time deputy, Commander Salva Kiir without a hitch. With a deep sigh of relief, we felt assured that things will be all right after all.
So comrades, here is 2007 and we are indeed all right. The CPA as a whole is still alive, albeit with a few wounds and bruises here and there. The challenge now is to heal the wounds and stagger ahead. We have to. Peace, in the sense of absence of violence, is holding throughout the South. There are exceptions of course as would be expected in comparable situations. The Lord’s Resistance Army is still menacing Equatoria, but Vice President Dr Riek Machar is fixing that. Upper Nile beat the odds and achieved voluntary disarmament. Jongolei is calmly receiving a large number of its internally displaced and refugees. Regrettably, the Bahr el Ghazal States could have done better in keeping the peace, but they are listening now. Bentiu is disturbed by the environmental problems caused by the oil business. Otherwise, they are focused on the mission of food security and rural development. December witnessed unpleasant vibrations in Malakal and Juba, but both were quickly managed. All in all we had more security, peace and stability than expected. There was peace and stability because both the people and the leadership firmly wanted it and worked hard to sustain in. On a scale of one to ten, we give ourselves eight.
Unfortunately, we did not achieve the economic and social development objectives we set for our selves. If you are in Southern Sudan or have been there, you need no one to tell you that we are nowhere close to a pass grade. If you are a long distance observer, you only need to flip through the “200 Day Action Plan” to arrive at the same conclusion. Sure, much has been done in terms of institution building, planning, etc. But the general public does not include invisibles and intangibles on the score card. If they cannot see and touch an achievement, it does not exist. They do not care for example, if we have signed a Tripartite Memorandum of Understanding with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the Republic of Mamamia. What they want to know is how many of their relatives have been repatriated from Egypt, whether the road to Kajokaji has been de-mined, whether Luri Primary School is ready to enroll pupils, whether Fanjak hospital has X-Ray, how many crooks are in jail, when Yambio is delivering pineapples… . As we celebrate the second anniversary of the CPA, let us pose for a moment to look back. Let us conduct a performance evaluation so we can better understand where we are, why we are here and why we are not where we wanted to be. A self audit will show us what we did that we should not have done. It will reveal what we did not do that we should have done. The top ten salient elements of our audit questionnaire are:
Were our goals too ambitious?
Did we receive the financial resources we expected? If not, why not?
Were our achievements proportionate to the resources that we actually used?
What percentage of our expenditure went to a b c …x y z?
Did we focus on the vision?
Were we distracted?
How did the decentralization arrangement work out?
Did we experience lack of capacity is financial management?
Was there an external hand holding us back?
How did we recruit, mobilize, and deploy?
Comrades, let us recall the courage, patriotism, and sacrifice of our fallen heroes and do better in 2007. The Struggle Continues!
* The author is the Sudan’s Ambassador to Japan.