South Sudan on the brink of collapse

IS the Republic of South Sudan, which entered the international community in July 2011 as the 193rd independent nation, a good candidate for the status of a failed state?
Keeping in view the current turmoil there that could very well be the case. Indeed, this newly minted entity, with a land mass the size of Texas, has already made its appearance on the list of similarly designated countries of the US think tank Fund for Peace, an index often cited by journalists and academics in making broad comparative points about countries.
Since 1945, seventy newly independent nations emerged from the ashes of colonial rule. Many of them, sadly, went on to become failed states. The term — a western coinage — has been criticized by policy researchers for being arbitrary and fanciful, perhaps even Eurocentric. And it’s true that there is no general consensus on the definition of the term. But surely we say that a state has failed — and get away with our assessment — when that state’s ruling elite, functioning as a central government, are so inept and ineffective that they have little practical control over events, where they have, say, been unable to provide functioning public services, or unable to stem crime, civil strife, economic decline, illiteracy, widespread corruption, inequality and the rest of it — where, in the absence of a social contract between the ruler and the ruled, everyman effectively is for himself.
Since South Sudan seceded from the larger nation of Sudan three years ago, after decades of civil war that took millions of lives, political commentators in the US (including this writer) had to admit to themselves that they were ignorant about the landlocked country of nine million — except for its famous contribution, not so whimsical for Americans, to basketball, when two of its players, Luol Deng and Mante Bol, starred in the National Basketball Association (NBA).
A measure of that ignorance, for example, was how initially everyone spoke of “Muslim Sudan” and the “Christian south.” The new Republic of South Sudan is not, as we know by now, a “Christian nation.” A majority of its people, in fact, embraces traditional beliefs indigenous to their regions, while Christians constitute a minority, and even this minority blends its faith with the animist view of the world.
The problem with South Sudan, a failed state on the brink of collapse, is that its leaders, most notably the country’s president and its vice president, have put their tribal, or ethnic, loyalties above their people’s national interests. Though their country is blessed with abundant oil reserves, which they could have used to bring about economic prosperity, they opted instead to let their personal differences degenerate into all-out fighting among their supporters.
And it all started in the middle of December when President Salva Kiir accused his vice president Rick Machar of engineering a coup. Not to be outdone, Machar accused Kiir of tolerating corruption. Then the president’s armed supporters, ethnic Dinka, and the vice president’s equally armed supporters, ethnic Nuer, went at each other’s throats. Thousands have so far been killed and, according to the United Nations, 180,000 displaced.
All this because the president thought his right-hand man was gunning for his job?
The sad fact is that there’s more to it than that. Since South Sudan’s people won independence, they have not been able to overcome, or transcend, their ethnic differences for the common good — not to mention the scramble by each group to grab what it could from their country’s oil resources. Moreover, since these disparate folks have never shared that bond of nationhood that binds what we call a nation together.
South Sudan is a state — one balks at calling it a “nation” — where ethnic affiliation matters more, as a vehicle for self-definition, than national identity. To say you’re a Dinka or a Nuer is to tell the world how you apprehend nature and social relations. To say you’re South Sudanese is an ancillary adjunct to who you are. Thus, as was true in so many instances of civil war in Africa since the 1940s, the war in South Sudan is anchored in how your ethnic milieu has come to frame the world. Unable to see themselves as members of a national collectivity, the product of one polity larger than a tribe, together they cry havoc and together they rend the others’ flesh.
Back in July 2011, the emergence of South Sudan as a “new nation,” was seen as a big success story, testament to President Obama’s earlier decision to appoint two special envoys to attend a UN meeting on Sudan that facilitated the drafting of a road map for South Sudanese independence, and to pour into the country hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.
That was more than two years ago. Now the people of this fledgling country appear headed to a life lived in the shadow of ruinous conflict for a long time to come.