South Sudan deserves right kind of elections

South Sudan President Salva Kiir left and his First Vice President Riek Machar (File Image)

As Africa’s youngest nation prepares for what would be its first national vote since independence in 2011, the temptation to treat December 2026 as a symbolic deadline rather than a democratic milestone must be resisted.

Elections held without trust, consensus and inclusion will not deliver peace. Instead, they are likely to deepen the fractures that the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) was meant to heal.

That is why the warning by the Reconstituted Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (RJMEC) must be taken seriously. The monitors are right because any electoral process that excludes key stakeholders, particularly the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM-IO) aligned to detained First Vice President Dr Riek Machar, risks plunging the country back into bloody instability.

President Salva Kiir’s government argues that elections must proceed first, with constitutional review and a population census to follow later.

It has already approved amendments on the peace agreement to pave the way for the December polls and says a caretaker government should be in place by October.

But peace agreements are the legal and moral foundation on which South Sudan’s fragile peace still depends and not administrative inconveniences to be bypassed when politically inconvenient.

Far from being only about getting to elections, the 2018 agreement was also about security reforms, constitutional order, power-sharing and democratic governance.

It was designed to ensure that when elections eventually came, they would be credible and accepted by all major actors. To separate elections from those reforms is to remove the very safeguards that make elections meaningful.

RJMEC has correctly pointed to Articles 1.9.4 and 8.4 of the agreement, which require consultation, consensus and broad approval before amendments can be made. This is the law of the peace process itself and not optional.

Trying to amend the agreement without meaningful participation from Machar, a principal signatory to the agreement, and his allies, threatens the legitimacy of the entire transition.

Machar is not a peripheral figure but one half of the power-sharing arrangement that has kept a fragile balance in place. His continued detention and exclusion from decisions of such magnitude make any claim of inclusivity difficult to defend.

Russia’s support for the elections, including training electoral officials in Moscow, may be useful in technical terms. The United Nations too has expressed support for peaceful and credible polls. But international endorsement cannot substitute for domestic legitimacy.

Even Moscow has acknowledged that the security situation is deteriorating, with intensified clashes in northern states and alarming violence in Jonglei.

The humanitarian situation is equally grim, with the UN warning that the country stands at a dangerous crossroads, facing the risk of famine. This is hardly the environment in which rushed elections can produce stability.

The transitional period has already been extended three times because key conditions were not met. That delay was frustrating, but a flawed election that triggers renewed conflict would be far worse than a carefully negotiated extension that preserves peace.

The lesson from many post-conflict states is that elections do not automatically create legitimacy and sometimes merely formalise division. South Sudan must therefore avoid the dangerous illusion that voting, by itself, equals democracy.

An election must not only be held; it must be seen to be free, fair and inclusive. That means opposition participation, transparent legal processes, security guarantees, voter confidence and adherence to the peace agreement. Anything less would be a ballot over a battlefield.

Source: https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/opinion/editorials/south-sudan-deserves-right-kind-of-elections-5436598