March 5th 2019 (Nyamilepedia) – A renowned South Sudan academic said on Monday that the government of South Sudan do not need international funding to implement the revitalized peace deal signed last year by gov’t and opposition groups.
President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Dr. Riek Machar in September signed a revitalized version of a 2015 peace agreement in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to end the ongoing civil war following months of intense negotiations hosted by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum.
The parties to the agreement have been complaining of lack of fund to implement the deal calling on international community to help cover the costs of the implementation either fully or partially.
In an opinion article published by the Gurtong on Monday, renowned South Sudan scholar, Dr. Jok Madut Jok, who is also a co-founder of the Juba-based Sudd Institute, rejected calls by the leaders of South Sudan for international community to fund the agreement.
“It is really misguided that national leaders worth their name should go on claiming that the whole of South Sudan, a country that came into existence as a middle income country – what with oil and everything else – would go on crying to the so-called donor countries that the country has no money to give meaning to its own peace endeavor, a peace only its own citizens are most desperate for,” he wrote.
He pointed to the increasing oil prices at the international market where South Sudan’s main source of revenue, oil, is sold as prove that the world’s youngest nation which gained its independence from Sudan in July 2011 can self-fund the agreement.
“The price of oil on the global market is up and that a few of our leaders, above all those in Petroleum Ministry and in Finance, are being fattened, just as the citizens of Yei are fleeing their homes to Uganda, people in Jonglei still get attacked in tribal-inspired enmity, Western Bahr el Ghazal communities are still living in the bush, 4 million are still IDPs and 2 million in refugee camps,” he added.
“I am not saying that it is easy to tackle all this problems at a go, but I see no sign any one is working to address all these issues, even as the bank accounts of a few cats in the government are swelling across the border, and as we keep hearing that ‘oh the donors don’t want to support the peace implementation’,” he further added.
