What the leaders of South Sudan need to avoid as they begin the task of building a state and moulding a nation
Last week I
was in Juba, South Sudan on the invitation by friends from the Sudan
People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). It is an invitation I had been
postponing for nearly two years, unsure what awaited me. But I knew it
was a great opportunity to witness at firsthand an experiment in
building a state from scratch. There are hardly any new states emerging
from nowhere unto the world scene anymore. I was both saddened and
thrilled by what I witnessed during that brief visit.
Therefore,
as I moved around Juba and slightly beyond, something struck me: these
people; inexperienced in the art of government, have a monumental task
of trying to build a government and all its functions all at once. They
have to build physical infrastructure and equip themselves with skills
to run the ministries. Building hospitals, schools, roads and office
blocks is the easiest part. With oil money, South Sudan can hire the
best architects to design and the best construction companies to build
anything. The hard part is building systems to deliver healthcare and
education services, maintain roads and bridges, etc.
I was
saddened by the sheer scale of the challenge given the absence of human
skill to deliver on the tasks. But I was thrilled by the opportunity to
begin from nowhere and do great things. Without skills, South Sudanese
will bungle many things up. Contractors will cheat on projects.
Individuals will take advantage of internal weaknesses to divert vital
resources from their intended public purposes to personal gain. Donors
will recommend and South Sudan will accept well tested policies and
institutions – both those that have worked best in the West and those
most unsuited for the new nation’s real challenges and much more.
Then there
is politics; the local and regional (involving the wider Sudan and its
own schisms), and the international. Internally, South Sudan has
primarily the task of building an identity of the new nation from the
myriad “tribes” that constitute it. This will be the most important task
that can be best served by the promotion of a national language. The
second most important task will be to build a state and focus attention
on institutions like the army, police, intelligence and judiciary to
ensure that the state can perform its most basic function – protection
of people’s lives and property. To perform these basic functions, South
Sudan will need money. Therefore, the government will need to build
institutions for economic management like an effective central bank (for
monetary management), a good ministry of finance (for fiscal
management) and a strong tax administration system (for resource
mobilisation).
Donors and
other elites would talk about democracy, human rights, economic
development etc. All these are necessary but not primary. South Sudan
needs to begin early to ignore such voices. The government needs to be
clear about what is primary, what is secondary and what comes last. An
attempt to provide equal attention to all challenges is not a formula
for success. Particular attention has to be placed on those things that
are vital for national survival and security is most paramount. But
because the provision of security needs to be backed by money, the
promotion of good macroeconomic policies and creation of institutions to
do this go together.
The
experience gained in building an effective security system – police,
army and intelligence services – will be vital when government attention
extends its focus to building affective systems for the delivery of
services like education and health, transport and communication systems
for the country. The dilemma for South Sudan is that because it has
limited human capital, it has to move very fast to invest in its people
i.e. funding them to acquire education and skills. Initially, I would
suggest training people abroad especially in the region, as it slowly
builds its own capacity.
This is a
task that will take generations. By paying special attention to building
local security capacity, South Sudan will be able to effectively
counter schemes from Khartoum, tell international human rights groups to
back off and hold the international community seeking to usurp its
sovereignty at bay. The new nation will also need to avoid too much
World Bank, United Nations, and especially the kind Western European
involvement in its affairs. Many of these groups will be well
intentioned but they will seek to implement policies and practices that
work best in their countries and will most likely be least suited for a
new nation like South Sudan.
In this
direction, South Sudan will need to build alliances with regional states
like Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Rwanda to learn how each
one of them has built itself from scratch by reorganising the colonial
and quasi-colonial structures to meet domestic needs. The danger of
course will be an attempt to re-invent the wheel. There is so much good
in our inherited colonial institutions and practices. The challenge is
how to domesticate them and bring them into alignment with local
peculiarities. However, South Sudan has to know that there are no
solutions from the experience of its neighbours for its own development;
there are vital lessons.
Democracy
is a vital public good that few would argue against. But it needs many
things in place for it to work properly. This is the lesson South Sudan
should take heed of. A rushed and over ambitious drive to democratise
before the state’s own capacity to mediate conflicts has been put in
place is a recipe for disaster. And South Sudan should remember that
democracy is a journey of generational time, not an event that can be
achieved in one day or week or month or year.
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