South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"
By Awan Achiek
A university don on Monday said the ongoing high-level mediation talks for South Sudan taking place in Kenya, will help galvanize the country as it heads for it’s first ever general election in December this year.
Prof. Abraham Kuol Nyuon, Dean of School of Social and Economic Studies at the University of Juba, said the talks launched on May 3 in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital by President William Ruto will not only galvanize the country for the upcoming general election, but also lay the foundation for durable peace in the country by bringing on board the last vestiges of dissenting voices.
“I think the Revitalized Transitional Government of National Unity (R-TGoNU) has seen it possible to bring everybody on board before they could be able to talk about elections,” Kuol said in an interview in Juba.
Kuol said the Nairobi peace agreement would be annexed to the 2018 Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), which was mediated by the regional body Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to end years of conflict since December 2013.
“The current peace talks in Nairobi will have two aspects, one is that if they signed an agreement it will be annexed to the R-ARCSS, and it will demonstrate that South Sudan is now completely out of war through imagination because everybody has been brought on board,” he disclosed.
Kuol noted that the final agreement will go a long way in accommodating interests of all political actors.
“There is nothing new that is going to come out apart from them (politicians) being accommodated into the government, which means more bills coming for the people of South Sudan,” he said.
The Nairobi peace talks dubbed “Tumaini” meaning hope in Swahili are being attended by the transitional unity government and hold-out opposition groups like Real-Sudan People’s Liberation Movement led by Pagan Amum and the South Sudan United Front under Paul Malong Awan, the former chief of staff of the South Sudan People’s Defense Force (SSPDF).
However, the National Salvation Front (NAS) led by Thomas Cirilo Swaka, the former deputy chief of logistics in the SSPDF have boycotted the talks citing insecurity in Nairobi and also because they were not consulted.
The peace talks between the government and hold-out opposition parties under the South Sudan Opposition Movement Alliance (SSOMA) were initially mediated by the Catholic community of Saint Egidio in Rome, Italy.
The peace negotiations which began in November 2019, resulted into the signing of the cessation of hostilities (COH) and the declaration of principles, but did not progress far in realizing settlement of grievances of the opposition groups.
The National Salvation Front (NAS) continues to wreak havoc in Central Equatoria State in violation of the cessation of hostilities.
