Juba, South Sudan
July 17, 2022 — South Sudan President, Salva Kiir Mayardit, and the First Vice President, Dr. Riek Machar Teny, have agreed to graduate the Necessary Unified Forces (NUF) at the end of July, SPLM Interim Secretary General Peter Lam Both said.
According to Lam, the command structure is already unified and the graduation of forces shall follow suit before the end of July.
“The bills are in parliament and they are being debated, the command structure is already unified, and by the end of this month, the graduation of unified forces will take place,” Lam told journalists during a press conference in Juba on Friday.
The 2018 agreement stipulates that, the nation is supposed to train and graduate a unified force of 83,000 personnel to take charge of security during the transitional period until 2023, the end of transition period.
According to Lam, the efforts to expedite the process have been frustrated by the economic constraints in the country which have left the government with limited resources.
Because the process has taken long, some soldiers have died in the training and others have abandoned the cantonent sites in search for greener pastures somewhere else.
Many cantonment sites have faced supplies shortage ranging from food, medicines, safe clean water and other basic necessities.
Opposition members of the government have argued that President Salva Kiir Mayardit’s group, the SPLM-IG, is not demonstrating political will to graduate the forces and that there is enough money in the country that could be used for the security arrangements.
Kiir’s side said on several occasions that there are no guns to graduate the first batch of 53,000, and attributing the delay on the arms embargo imposed on the country in 2018 by the United Nations Security Council prior to the signing of the peace deal.
Despite the lack of progress, president Kiir assured the country again on his address to the nation on July 9th that he will not return the country to war.
