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In the South - All Want Pie, But Not Enough to Go Round

The Nation (Nairobi)
ANALYSIS
April 27, 2007
Posted to the web April 26, 2007

By Dean Diyan
Juba
Confronted by a rising chorus from county-level leaders who called for a
further subdivision of Southern Sudan into more units last December 11, the
Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) President Salva Kiir has firmly put his
foot down.
"I can also claim a county for my village because I feel marginalised," the
president told commissioners and governors at a conference to discuss the
future of the region. He was aware that the clamour for new counties was partly
pushed by people who wanted to get seats in the legislative assembly.
"This will not happen, because representation in Parliament is also based on
the population on the ground," he said as the delegates clapped.
But closing the conference, Mr Kiir's deputy, Dr Riek Machar, said he saw
nothing wrong with subdividing the Sudan into more units, because that seemed
the only way to distribute resources equally.
"I think this was the vision of our late leader [John Garang]," Machar said as
the delegates applauded, indicating that the President Kiir's stand was not
entirely popular with them.
As Southern Sudan takes the steps towards statehood, six words - Garang's "Take
the Towns to the People" - are at the heart of the contest to carve out the
administrative and political spheres of Southern Sudan. (The words are taken
from a 5,707-word statement Garang read at the signing of the peace agreement
in Naivasha, Kenya, in January 2005.) Needless to add, the contest, invariably,
rotates around the allocation of resources.
Everybody wants a piece of the pie or what they reckon is the pie. Apparently,
there's too little pie to go around and not everybody seems to think so.
At the December conference, Caesar Arkanglo, the chairman of Southern Sudan's
Local Government Board presented a stop-gap strategy about taking services to a
public that is impatient with the slow pace of service delivery two years after
the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed.
"There will be no new staff recruits, and no new counties for those clamouring
for them," the head of a body that advises the President on the future of the
federal/local arrangements of the region summed up the GoSS position.
"If anyone of you has come with such a claim in his pocket, please wrap it up,"
he said
Rampant insecurity
But with Dr Machar's support for more politico-administrative units, it's
apparent that he is not reading from the same script with his boss and
therefore sees southern Sudan's problems differently.
A major problem is the bloated, unqualified local government civil service
inherited from the Government of Sudan but the workers can't be sacked easily
without antagonising southern unity ahead of the 2011 referendum.
Second, there is insecurity that prevents qualified staff from moving to work
in the areas where they are needed desperately.
Southern Sudan (619,745 square km) is more than two times the size of Uganda
(236,040 square km), slightly bigger than Kenya (582,650 square km), and is
federated into 10 states headed by governors, and 79 counties, each bigger than
Rwanda and headed by commissioners.
The GoSS had, from the onset, planned to have 50,000 civil servants all over
southern Sudan.
"That proved difficult because there are lists which we don't understand,"
President Kiir says. "Whether they are real names, or ghost names, we don't
know."
During the war, he recalls, people would register their children and absentee
family members as part of their employees.
"You could even write the name of your cow, even your dog, and you would be
paid for it," says the President.
"That was not our government; this is our government. We shouldn't cheat
ourselves."
For instance, one county has half of its staff listed as non-professional and
unqualified - office messengers and labourers, according to officials.
Officials reckon that the bloated workforce is occupying the spot meant for a
qualified staff needed to deliver basic services, most of which are non-
existent.
Per capita national income is less than a dollar a day, according to the World
Bank.
Literacy is 25 per cent, according to the last census conducted in 1983 - or
worse, according to analysts, if the effects of the war are factored in. Nearly
everything is down.
President Kiir must fix these problems, as many southern Sudanese expect a
peace dividend.
To show how important the delivery of service is to the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement, a consultative conference on the type of local government framework
the region should adopt themed its deliberations on Garang's "Take the towns to
the people". Local government officials are taking that statement literally,
and using it for inspiration in some interesting ways.
When Local Government Board officials visited Kapoeta, a county in New Site,
the region of Garang's country home, rather than take them to the trading
centre, the commissioner invited them deeper into his village, planted the
Southern Sudan flag into the ground, and told them that was his office.
"Soon our development partners may visit him, and Kapoeta will turn into a
town," says Arkanglo.
"This commissioner would have succeeded in taking his town to his village."
Taking towns to the people, says Arkanglo, is going to be the vehicle for
achieving the Millennium Development Goals, such as access to education,
health, safe water, ending poverty and building infrastructure.
"Taking towns to the people means taking services to the people," says Dr Shyam
Bhuriel, the team leader of UNDP's governance unit in Southern Sudan.
This is an underlying objective of the peace agreement and it's what Garang
said it would be.
At the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Naivasha, Garang said:
"The SPLM vision, policy and slogan shall be to take the towns to people in the
countryside rather than people to towns, where they end up in slums as happened
in many countries with the consequent deterioration in their quality of life."
Proposed blueprint
But the only thing the people have received so far, according to the local
government framework - the blueprint for the proposed local government system -
is the silence of the guns, and the establishment of local governments in the
south, but not tangible wealth.
"This situation can only change with timely enactment of the Local Government
Act for Southern Sudan as the law that regulates all aspects of local
government," says the blueprint.
Southern Sudan's federal structure is loosely modelled along the United
States'.
Each state is split into three to 11 counties - some the size of Rwanda, or
bigger.
The thinking is that the devolution of powers would partly improve efficiency.
Devolution is also being seen as a means of keeping people spread fairly across
the vast, deserted countryside.
"In Yei, for example, the population is big simply because there are no
services in the villages. The same thing is happening in Juba, Wau and
Khartoum," President Kiir says, of Southern Sudan's second capital.
Yei is one of three towns served with electricity in the south , thanks to a
USAID project in 2005.
"We may not be able to provide them with services if they are concentrated that
way," says President Kiir.
In some instances, devolution is seen as a means to attract an estimated 3.4
million internally displaced southerners who are reluctant to return from
Khartoum.
"Despite the terrible conditions they are living in there, their children can
go to school, and get medical treatment," says the president. "Unless we work
hard, that objective may not be achieved," he adds.
Under the peace agreement, the sharing out of resources is based on the size of
the population. And if the internally displaced people are not counted in the
north during a national census in 2008, less resources will be allocated to the
south.
Sudan's population is projected at 41 million; but only 6 million people live
in the South, a region that is 24 times the size of Rwanda, although Rwanda has
10 million people.
The Devolution of power also makes it easier to oversee security across the
vast country.
"The civil war would have been hard to fight had a grassroots organisation not
existed," James Kok Ruea, the chairperson of Southern Sudan Peace Commission
says.
The grassroot organisations then were chieftaincies. The commissioners must now
organise their counties against insecurity and the militia groups still
operating in the south.
No budgetary allocations
Challenges abound. Money is not enough, or doesn't seem to be. Counties still
have no budgetary allocations from the central government.
"So everybody wants to be in the GoSS so that they can smell something, and
perhaps also be given something," says Achol Oyien Rehan, one of only three
female commissioners in southern Sudan.
The local governments also have no sources of revenue because the peace
agreement made services such as education free.
"Now, how do you tell people to collect taxes?" Rehan said in reaction to GoSS
calls that they should collect their own revenue to run their regions. "I don't
think we have that weapon: And you are telling us to deliver services to the
people."
The local government framework now proposes that counties collect property,
social security, animal, and sales taxes and permit fees. The commissioners
says that would not be enough and want income tax from NGOs . But the GoSS also
wants this money.
One of the most pressing challenges for Mr Kiir's government is how to sack
incompetent fellow southerners from jobs they aren't doing well, and still keep
them united against the government in Khartoum which many see as a common enemy
as they go into the 2011 referendum.
Officials reckon they are in a Catch-22 situation, meaning the problems of
sharing the pie will continue to hurt the south for some time.
"To establish a credible government for the south, a raft of changes will have
to be made," Arkanglo told commissioners in December, as he reminded them that
the government in Khartoum used to give money to commissioners and tell them to
spend it as they wished as a way of buying loyalty.
"Now you inherited this. These were traps. They were put there to make you
fight," said Arkanglo.
The fighting in Malakal after a militia commander, Gabriel Tanginya, allied to
the Sudan Armed Forces tried to assassinate the commissioner, a post he himself
coveted, showed how slippery loyalties could be unless they were based on
wealth sharing.
Juba Declaration
A Juba Declaration in January 2005 merged the Sudan People's Liberation Army
(SPLA) and the South Sudan Defense Forces (SSDF), an umbrella of government-
aligned armed groups dating back to 1991 when it fought alongside Riek Machar
against Garang.
Tanginya received sanctuary in Khartoum where he remains free despite demands
from Kiir for his arrest.
In another county, a commissioner was ambushed and shot dead. Such hurdles
don't augur well for the turning Southern Sudan into a prosperous region and
building viable structures of government.
Well, at least, until after the referendum.
Many say Khartoum has a silent plan to scuttle the referendum, and some are
beginning to see war as inevitable.
"As our late chairman used to say, we'll make the price of not implementing the
peace agreement higher than the price of implementing it," Ruea says.
"We know what they are doing, and we are also alert to what we should do."
Problems or none, President Kiir says it will take five to 15 years to develop
the ideal local government system for Southern Sudan, which would make towns
out of villages.
But until the referendum is carried out, taking towns to Southern Sudan, which
some citizens often call the biggest village in the world, might remain,
simply, an ideal.
"It's very difficult to predict really because we are in a transition period,"
says Kot Riak, a professor at the University of Khartoum, and a UNDP
consultant.
"Until when the referendum is carried out, let's wait and see."
But time is not on Mr Kiir's side. The people want pie, and they want it
yesterday.
Diyan contributes to the Daily Nation from southern Sudan. Africa Insight is an
initiative of Nation Media's Group Africa media network


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