Business
East Africa’s new great oil game
Instead, the shanty towns expand inexorably, housing disenchanted new arrivals who feel cut off from the new economy. Providing them with basic state services and jobs will test the ingenuity of governments. For governments tempted to ignore the new underclass, South Sudan serves as a cautionary tale. An abiding weakness of governments in East Africa is their ethnocentrism; their tendency to favor crassly their ethnic support bases in the allocation of public sector jobs, appointments, commercial opportunities and government tenders.
South Sudan’s crisis may have been exacerbated by its weak institutions, but the best illustration of this was the government’s failure to rein in cronyism, corruption and ethnic rivalries in the state sector. In South Sudan, these weaknesses caused a war. In other countries in the region, they produce bad elections and policy-making, and hold back burgeoning economies.
The Ugandan play
The explosion of fighting in South Sudan in December 2013 has produced much soul searching and ad hoc diplomacy. Every supporter of Africa’s newest state believed they had a right to admonish and advise the two war- ring sides, much to the irritation of East Africa’s leaders.
“People say that South Sudan is a failed state. I disagree. South Sudan is a state that never was,” says Mabior Garang de Mabior, son of Sudan People’s Liberation Movement founder John Garang and a member of former vice-president Riek Machar’s negotiating team. He went on to argue, “The first republic of South Sudan is dead. We should now begin considering how to constitute the second republic.”
Beyond clashes between the supporters of Riek and President Salva Kiir, South Sudan’s crisis is testing the solidity of regional diplomacy. The biggest danger is that the national conflict could escalate and draw in countries from the region. Immediately problematic was the continued presence of Uganda’s troops, with their avowed mission to shore up Salva’s government. The January ceasefire agreement contained a clause about withdrawal of foreign troops, but its ambiguity has allowed Juba and Kampala to ignore it.
How the Ugandan troops issue is handled will determine the direction and duration of the crisis, according to officials at the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the eight-member regional development and security body. President Museveni mounted a robust defence of the role of Uganda’s troops in South Sudan in January, finding a justification in the region’s interlocking linguistic, ethnic, political and economic relationships.
At a meeting in Angola of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, Museveni described the region’s problems as ideological and organisational but criticised politicians for lacking discipline: “The manipulation of tribes and religions is a pseudo ideology, is a false ideology, not reflecting the interests of the people but hose of the opportunists and parasites spurred on by foreign interests.”
