A Call for an End to Dependency

The Perspective of An Elder

As a member of the sun-setting generation, our role is to advise and consent. Our principal source of ideas is experience. For me personally, this has included the honour of serving my country, now two countries of Sudan and South Sudan, in senior positions at home and diplomatically abroad. Pertinent also are my two UN mandates as Representative of the Secretary-General on Internal Displacement and Under-Secretary-General and Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, both of which took me on missions around the world. In both crises, our country of the Sudan, particularly in the Southern region, and our continent of Africa, were the worse hit. I must admit at the outset that I plan to build heavily on these experiences. To be heard and effective, an elder must speak with a voice of honesty, credibility, and integrity, ‘without fear or favour’, as conventional usage would put it.

In my personal and public life, I have always been guided by two sets of principles. One is that pessimism leads to a dead-end and should be avoided, while optimism, if based on a sound ground, is a challenge that stimulates remedial action. The second is that crises, however painful, offer opportunities that can be tapped and built upon to explore and implement strategies for addressing the challenges posed by the crises.

The Emerging World Dis-Order

The world is currently in an emerging global dis-order, with the old order in disarray and a new order not yet in place. The declaration of ‘America First’ by President Donald J. Trump of the United States, whose country has been the principal benefactor for countries and regional and international organizations, including major humanitarian agencies, is reverberating the world over. This declaration of America’s threat to withdraw or reduce its international obligations is based on the allegation that countries and international organizations have been taking advantage of the United States. While there are reciprocal geo-political advantages in America’s interaction with its international partners, this perception  must be taken as a wake-up call for the dependent nations to acknowledge their problems as domestically rooted and requiring home grown solutions.

This was the core of “Sovereignty as Responsibility, which I and my colleagues at the Brookings African studies program which I founded and directed for twelve years, developed, and was later recast by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty as ‘Tho Responsibility to Protect’, R2P or RtoP. There are three pillars to this responsibility: the responsibility of the state for its citizens; international responsibility to help develop state capacity to discharge its national responsibility, and a more robust intervention by the-international community to protect populations in case of manifest state failure to protect its citizens. Focus must however be placed on the first pillar, state responsibility as the foundation of sovereignty. ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility’ was the framework I used in my dialogue with governments in carrying out my global mandates on internal displacement and genocide prevention.

Dilemmas of Unfulfilled Liberation

Since the wave of independence from colonialism in the 1950s, Sudan being the first African country to achieve formal independence on January 1, 1956, African countries have been precariously poised between their independence and remaining dependent on the former colonial countries. Despite appreciable efforts over the decades, Pan-African quest for unity and self-reliance has remained a mere aspiration.

The three West African countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger now appear to be takings steps in the direction of African awakening. They have formed the Alliance of Sahel States to end dependency on external powers, and build a self-reliant confederation with a common market, currency, and infrastructure. While this is a daring adventure that is fraught with risks and monumental challenges, it offers potentially useful lessons. The main lesson to be drawn from this adventure is to prioritize self-reliance, take control of national resources, foster regional integration and cooperation, and pave the way for a new era of genuine self-determination, full independence, and an end to dependency.

The world knows that African countries are endowed with vast natural resources that had led to the European imperial scramble for Africa in the first place. Independence was not only to free the Continent from the colonial yoke, but also to regain ownership of the resources and their productive utilization. Amidst this natural wealth, it is an anathema for Africa to remain impoverished and dependent on foreign aid, including in the vital area of food security. In countries suffering from internal conflicts, vulnerable populations are food insecure because the rural populations are not able to cultivate due to insecurity resulting from pervasive violence. Foreign aid in turn nourishes increased dependency and erodes national pride and dignity.

Peace, security, stability, and development are interconnected existential priority areas. Ensuring   security for the people, encouraging and supporting them to grow their food crops to meet their subsistence needs, and produce surplus and cash crops to generate income,  are essential prerequisites not only to the the development of their communities and countries, but to also stabilize population movements and reducing the massive  influx to urban areas and migration to foreign countries.

Paradoxes of the Liberation of South Sudan

When I was in the United Nations as Under-Secretary-General and Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, my wife and I had the honour of hosting President Salva Kiir Mayardit of the newly independent South Sudan and his delegation to the General Assembly. Although the President was not feeling well, he pushed himself to give us the honour of attending the dinner. In my welcoming remarks, I stressed two points, which I recall here to underscore the challenges we all realised were inherent in the independence we had just achieved. First, I restated what we all knew, that the independence of South Sudan had been strongly opposed by powerful voices from our African region and in the international community who feared that we would be a failed state and a threat to regional and international peace and security. We had to  prove them wrong every day by our performance. My second point was that our country, blessed as it was with vast natural resources, must become self reliant and reduce dependency on foreign aid which had been essential during the struggle.

When I resumed my seat next to the President, he agreed with what I had said and affirmatively stated that we would not be a failed state. Not feeling well, he asked his foreign minister, Honourable Nhial Deng, to respond to my remarks. Minister Nhial, gracious in his response, reaffirmed what the President had said and stressed the importance of our becoming self reliant. Obviously, since independence, we have failed to fulfil our aspirations, the main reason being the wars that erupted only two years after independence and proliferated into inter-communal violence that has devastated the country at all levels.

Peace Process Versus National Dialogue

When my term of office at the UN ended, I was honoured to be appointed the first Permanent Representative of South Sudan to the United Nations. The guiding principle in my diplomatic service has always been to see foreign policy as an extension of domestic policy which means that a diplomat must have some positive domestic commodities to promote internationally to gain support and cooperation. But in my new position, that principle soon proved to be more of an ideal that was not easily realisable as the civil war that soon broke out was tearing the new country apart. After my term of duty at the UN, I was appointed to various concurrent positions in the country, most of them related to two major processes – the Peace Process and the National Dialogue.

The two processes soon proved to be flawed by mutual controversy, suspicion, and animosity. This was evidence of the tension between external interventions and internally owned initiatives. The opposition parties in the peace process, which was initiated and funded by the region and the international community, viewed the National Dialogue, which was undertaken and fully funded by the government, as a ploy by the President to polish his political image. On their part, participants in the National Dialogue, a home-grown initiative in which people transparently and courageously spoke their minds in grassroots consultations, regional conferences, and planned to be concluded by a national conference, viewed the Peace Process as a foreign imposition in favor of the opposition. Since I was deeply involved in both processes, I endeavoured to foster complementarity, building on the relative merit of each process. There was the regional and international leverage behind the Peace Process while the National Dialogue enjoyed domestic legitimacy. My efforts were however suspected and dismissed by both sides, each one viewing me as favouring the other side. It is ironic that the word ‘complementarity’ was toxic to both sides.

In the deliberations of these bodies, except for the National Dialogue, which was a top-down and bottom-up process that conducted free and open consultations throughout the country, I was struck by the focus which the Peace Process placed on power-sharing by the warring factions  and related security arrangements at the center. The process was detached from the rural areas which were mostly embroiled in internecine violence and insecurity, which interrupted rural life, frustrated agricultural productivity, forced masses of the people to move to urban centres, and replaced the indigenous self-reliance of our traditional communities with dependency on foreign donors for survival.

In the end, neither the Revitalised Peace Process nor the National Dialogue fully delivered on its promises. The Revitalised Agreement continued to be perceived, even by its principal signatories, as a foreign imposition and was therefore only grudgingly implemented. The National Dialogue, whose deliberations and recommendations were documented in five volume-report produced with the generous support from UNDP, proved to be only a public catharsis and at best a legacy for future generations. Meanwhile, the country continued to be in a precarious state of insecurity, instability, and social turmoil.

The Paradox of Poverty Amidst Plenty    

South Sudan, a country rich with natural resources, vast arable land, with large herds of livestock, forests abundant with fruits and vegetables, rivers and lagoons teaming with fish, and plentiful wild game, now suffers from severe poverty, food insecurity, and stagnancy in development. A people well documented as staunchly independent, self-reliant, naturally endowed, proud, and dignified, have been reduced to humiliating reliance on foreign assistance, including food aid.

As a member of the Revitalised Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission, R-JMEC, in which senior members of the government, foreign diplomat, and representatives of international organizations participated, I felt scandalised to hear our national leaders in the government and opposition asking for international assistance for our soldiers in the cantons, to provide them with uniform, and food supplies. ‘Shame on us’, I cried aloud. I also admonished our leaders on both sides and international partners, including UN Peacekeeping Mission, UNMISS, for focusing on peace and security at the center while the countryside was burning.

In a meeting of the leadership of the ruling party, SPLM, to which I was invited, President Salva Kiir Mayardit, the Chairman of the party, made a powerful statement that deeply touched me. He said that when we became independent, we were a proud nation; we held our heads high and we were respected. Now, we are no longer proud; we are no longer respected; and we are no longer holding our heads high. He posed a rhetorical question, “Why?” And the answer he gave was “Because of what we have done to ourselves!” He continued to pose questions, “Why have we done this to our people?” After the meeting, I went to him and said, “Mr. President, I liked what you said, and I am going to use it in my dialogue with our international interlocutors.”

Causes and Futility of Sanctions

Later, the President asked me to chair a newly formed Presidential Advisory Committee on Sanctions, PACS. In our strategy meeting with him, I said that I was in principle opposed to sanctions because they rarely achieve their stated objectives and often hurt the innocent masses.  But sanctions, I argued, were a consequence of alleged domestic wrongdoing. I recalled what the President had said to the leadership of his ruling party, that we had committed mistakes which we must openly admit and correct. I suggested that in our strategic approach in the operational plan for PACS, we should build on his critique and engage with our interlocutors on the wrongs we had allegedly committed to justify the imposition of the sanctions and how we could cooperatively address them.

The President responded by endorsing our strategic plan for PACS. He restated that we must open a new page by acknowledging our mistakes and committing ourselves to correcting them in cooperation with our international partners. Ending the conflicts and ensuring inclusive peace and security must be the cornerstones of correcting our past wrongs and opening a new page for self-reliant development and nation-building.

The Challenge of Constructively Managing Diversity

In my UN mandates on internal displacement and genocide prevention, I observed that identity-related conflicts posed a global challenge from which hardly any country was immune. But, as I noted earlier, our continent and specifically our country, now countries, were the most affected. It must be emphasised that it is not differences as such, but the manner in which we manage, or to be more accurate, mismanage them, that generates conflicts. Mismanagement of diversity often privileges some groups, while discriminating, marginalising, and excluding other groups. Prevention and resolution of identity-rooted conflicts must therefore aim at ensuring inclusivity, equality, and dignity for all, without discrimination.

That was the principle I applied in my constructive dialogue with governments. The first five minutes with a head of state or the relevant minister were crucial to my delivering the message that national sovereignty should  not be viewed narrowly as a barricade against external involvement, but rather positively as entailing the responsibility of the state to protect and assist its needy population, with  international support as needed. Discharging the responsibilities of sovereignty was indeed the best way of safeguarding National sovereignty. The strategy of constructive management of diversity was well received governments.

The principle of constructive management of diversity has much in common with the framework which the SPLM stipulated as the New Sudan Vision, and which called for full equality and non-discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, culture, or gender. The separation of South Sudan was the result of our failure to realize that Vision. But, although that Vision was intended to address the gross inequities of the Old Sudan, it applies to the need for constructively managing the ethnic and tribal diversities of South Sudan. What the separation of the South did has been paradoxically to intensify the internal conflicts within both Sudan and South Sudan. This is now evident in the devastating war in the Sudan and the post-independence wars and continuing tensions in South Sudan. These conflicts can only be sustainably resolved by a win-win arrangement in which there is no winner or vanquished.

Devolving Power and Services to the People

We must implement the original call of the SPLM leadership that we use our oil revenues to fuel the engine of agriculture, take towns to the countryside, and build a network of roads to connect the communities and regions of the country. Peace processes must be taken to the masses of our communities in the rural areas, and the social services and amenities of the towns must be extended to the villages.

It is also crucial that power be devolved to the local communities to be autonomously self-administering as a form of internal self-determination. This requires deploying their resources, human and material, mobilising indigenous institutions, traditional leaders, and civil society organizations involving men, women, and youth, to work cooperatively to generate development as a process of self-enhancement from within. State governors and county administrators should be warned that the security of their positions will depend on their ensuring peace, security, stability and self-generated development in their areas of jurisdiction within a specified period of time.

This should have the effect of reversing the exodus from the countryside to the urban centres in search of security and the means of livelihood. Let us stop our people’s downward slide to impoverishment and help them build their capacity for self-reliant and sufficiency, and restore their erstwhile indigenous pride and dignity,

The Last Word

Let us honour President Salva Kiir Mayardit’s remarkable admission of the failures of post independence South Sudan to live up to its lofty vision for the  country and once again raise our heads up high, with justification, and not in an empty pride. Let us also recall the insightful and wise words of the heroic leader of South Sudan, the late Dr. John Garang de Mabior, when he said that self-determination is by definition what you yourself do to determine your destiny and not what is gratuitously given to you. So, let us rise above divisiveness and join hands to collectively shape a better future for our people. Let us ensure peace, unity, and stability for our people who have suffered for far too long to liberate themselves. And let us utilize our vast natural resources to promote a self-reliant approach to development and prosperity as self-enhancement from within.

This article originally appeared in Atar: Sudan in Perspective.