South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"

By Simon Deng
The Vice chancellor of the University of Juba Prof. John Apuruot Akech has said that the upcoming elections offer opportunity for citizens to exercise their constitutional right of choosing their leaders.
Akech said he was recently misrepresented when he argued on his Facebook page that South Sudan needs to have a well trained professional army for elections to be conducted in a free, fair and credible manner.
Several people misunderstood him for being against the upcoming December elections due to delays in the training and unification of forces.
“I am not against elections, I believe elections are the best thing that will actually allow the citizens to pick the people they want, actually when you are talking about representative democracy you cannot do it without elections,” Akech told The Dawn in an interview on Wednesday in Juba.
He said that having a bad election is better than not having one at all.
“My concern lately is that like all the partners, you can hear partners like Troika are talking about the deployment of forces and in fact the opposition also wants these forces to be deployed,” Akech said.
The Troika is an umbrella grouping of countries like U.S, United Kingdom and Norway who are major development partners to the electoral process in the country.
“We are now 10 months to elections and we are still talking about prerequisites, if we have people who are opposed to this election and we go and do election, it may not bring peace,” Akech said.
He also expressed fears of disagreements leading to renewed post-conflict elections because some parties still have their own armed base.
“They (parties) have their own militias, they could actually disrupt elections and we go back to violence that thing needs to be addressed, I am not saying we have to do all the prerequisites, we have to convince ourselves, we need to sit down rather than we talking with different voices. We have two major parties, the SPLM and SPLM-IO, if these two elephants do not agree then the grass will suffer,”Akech said.