In December 2024, South Sudan was scheduled to hold elections for the first time. They would have finally given its citizens a chance to pass judgment on the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which had fought a twenty-two-year-long civil war against the Sudanese government and then been in power in South Sudan ever since its secession in 2011. In the run-up to the vote, the SPLM held rallies up and down the country for Salva Kiir, the incumbent president, whose main opponent was one of his vice-presidents, Riek Machar.
The two men had fought on opposing sides of the civil war that broke out in the newly formed country in 2013. It began as a struggle between elites over control of the SPLM, as Machar led a rebel faction against Kiir. But the conflict rapidly took on ethnic dimensions. Kiir’s militia forces—recruited from his own ethnic group, the Dinka—went house to house in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, slaughtering civilians from the Nuer, the group to which Machar belongs.
Both sides inflamed local conflicts among South Sudan’s sixty-four ethnic groups as the country split into a series of warring militias. The remnants of Machar’s forces were comprehensively defeated on the battlefield. The peace agreement, ratified in 2018, was a negotiated surrender that Kiir signed under regional pressure. It enabled Machar to return to Juba as a vice-president, but power remained in the hands of Kiir’s confidants. With Machar’s position weakened, his support around the country collapsed.
Under the terms of the 2018 agreement, elections had originally been scheduled for 2022. The UK, the US, and Norway—the three countries in the Global North with the most investment in South Sudan, collectively known as the Troika—bemoaned the lack of preparation over the next four years and blamed the South Sudanese government for its lack of political will. In truth, Kiir had mastered the art of tajility, an Anglo-Arabic word from tajil, or “delay” in Arabic.
As the scholar Alex de Waal has noted, procrastination is a productive political strategy in the Sudans. Exhibit A was a proposal for a unified national army that, under the terms of the 2018 agreement, was to be formed from rebel and government forces. Kiir relegated the rebel troops to inoperative training camps and withheld food and medical care.
I visited several of these camps in 2019, only to be greeted by emaciated soldiers who were barely strong enough to pick up a gun, let alone fight. The rebel forces blamed Machar for the delays, and there were mass defections to the government. Kiir gained much by doing nothing. In 2022, when elections were supposed to be held, Kiir announced that they would be postponed for two years.
By 2024 the situation had changed. Kiir was now prepared to consolidate his victories on the battlefield by vanquishing Machar at the ballot box. Yet preparations for the elections still lagged. A census had not been conducted since South Sudan became independent. Although electoral bodies had been formed, they had received no funds, and so opposition political parties couldn’t register—in one case, because there was no paper for the printer.
The government blamed an economic crisis. In February 2024 South Sudan’s major oil pipeline went offline—the war in Sudan had prevented maintenance crews from addressing a rupture—taking with it approximately 90 percent of state revenue.
Most government salaries haven’t been paid in more than eighteen months, and the South Sudanese pound lost 72 percent of its value against the dollar in 2024—one of the highest rates of inflation in the world. “Even if I were paid,” one bureaucrat explained to me, “my monthly salary wouldn’t buy a kilo of goat.” Government employees customarily leave the office at lunchtime to find other ways to get by. Corruption is endemic.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial stance of Juba Witness. Joshua Craze is a writer and journalist with extensive work in South Sudan.