Due to a long-drawn-out political unrest no election has been held in South Sudan since it became the world’s newest country in July 2011.
General elections in South Sudan have been postponed several times since they were first scheduled to hold on July 9th 2015 – four years after the country split from the rest of Sudan and became independent following decades of bitter conflict.
There are lingering fears that they could be postponed yet again given that the preconditions for holding them may not be met by the time the new date late in 2024 comes around.
A letter by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres earlier in April pointed how far removed the world’s newest country is from meeting ”over a dozen critical preconditions necessary to hold genuine and peaceful elections”, this situation coming ”despite significant international support, including identification of key election issues by the United Nations, African Union, and Intergovernmental Authority on Development”.
The UN scribe looked no further than President Salva Kiir and his long time political archrival, First Vice President Riek Machar and others as responsible for the ‘collective failure” to guarantee a genuinely peaceful climate in which to organise the elections which would determine who leads South Sudan from December 2024.
A history of postponements
South Sudan was poised to hold elections on July 9th 2015 but this plan became untenable when two years earlier there was an attempted coup against current President Salva Kiir who accused current vice president Riek Machar of orchestrating it. The country quickly descended into civil strife and with the absence of a reliable constitution it became clear that the general elections were not to be held as originally scheduled.
The issue of extending both President Kiir’s presidency and term of the parliamentary was submitted to a vote in parliament where 264 MPs unanimously voted for the motion and postponed the polls until July 2018. With the situation in South Sudan remaining the same due to residual violence since the eruption of conflict in December 2013, the polls were moved yet again to 2021.
The elections would be rescheduled twice in the space of two years, with the democratic institutions still not in place to organise them despite a formal peace agreement ending the civil war and ushering in a transition which should have culminated in the exercise in 2023. However a year before they were to be held South Sudan’s political stakeholders agreed to move it to December 2024.
Question marks
This latest date leaves question marks all over it, according to the United States which points to reports of ongoing ”human rights violations, as well as inadequate investment in key democratic institutions”.
Washington is calling in the leadership of the transition to act decisively with view to tackling the pre-poll deficiencies which may prevent the polls from going ahead next December.
The Biden administration believes that correcting the flawed political landscape consists in ”protecting civic space, standing up politically neutral security forces, strengthening electoral institutions, and holding dialogue among leaders to resolve outstanding election decisions”.
It warns that the longer South Sudan stays in this quagmire, the greater the risk of additional violence which leaves an estimated 75 percent of its people in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.
The U.S says its advocacy for the democratic process in South Sudan is informed by a desire to stop the country’s possible slide back to civil war.
