Immediately after the death of the late SPLM chairman John Garang in 2005, the SPLM leadership met at New Site to debate where he should be buried. The options included his home village in Jonglei, the SPLM provisional capital Rumbek, or Juba.

As recounted by Dr. Luka Biong Deng, writing in 2012, “Some serious concerns were raised about the bitter experience with Kokora that made some of our leaders to question the rationale of burying the body of our Leader to rest in Juba, as the experience of Kokora may repeat itself.”

“Our leaders from Greater Equatoria reassured the SPLM Leadership meeting that with the body of our founding father buried in Juba, Juba will become a symbol of our unity and a litmus test to our commitment to the values of unity in diversity for which we fought,” he adds.

Today, seven months after the December violence in Juba, some SPLM leaders are again raising fears of ‘Kokora,’ including President Salva Kiir himself, who likens the current federalist movement in Equatoria to the Kokora movement of the early 1980s, during which many non-Equatorians were expelled. 

The key political moment of this month came on 3 July when the federalist leader Clement Wani Konga, governor of Central Equatoria, appeared defiantly in Juba after supposedly having fled the city and addressed rumors that his guards had clashed with the Presidential Guards.

While denying any recent clash with the president’s troops, the governor nonetheless spoke openly of the possibility, stating, “If there is a plan for that, it’s not going to be the Presidential Guards who will kill me. And I might not die in Juba. I might die somewhere, be it whether going home… or cultivating…”

By ‘home’ he meant Terekeka, homeland of the Mundari tribe, to the north of Juba.

On 13 July, Kiir traveled to Rumbek, and by 16 July he was in Wau. These were his first trips outside Juba to anywhere else in the country since December. Media coverage of these visits was limited, but a report by Gurtong quoted the governor of Western Bahr al Ghazal, Rizig Hassan Zacharia, a close ally of the president, as having proposed to the president relocation of the national capital to Wau.

Kiir himself, in a speech at Baggari Payam near Wau, joked about personally moving to the state. Though not reported elsewhere, the president stated, “If I were to stay here, I would go to [the Paramount Chief] and to the commissioner to ask them to give me a piece land here so that I can be one of the citizens among your citizens.”

Then he referred obliquely to relocating government services to the Wau area, saying, “You intermingled here as your tribes of Western Bahr al Ghazal, to the extent that we will bring you other people from other places; if your area becomes good, and there is security, many people will come here.” He concluded his speech stressing he would visit again.

Land and politics

A committee of elders from all three regions of the country meeting in Juba last Friday highlighted one of the key practical problems Kiir faces in maintaining his headquarters in Juba: land.

The Elders’ Forum – an initiative started by the federalist leader Governor Joseph Bakosoro – highlighted ‘land-grabbing in Juba’ as a key national problem. 

For Kiir, who needs to secure land for government institutions, and for homes for his soldiers and commanders, tensions with local landholders in the Juba area have long been an issue, and were a major factor in the cabinet’s preliminary 2012 decision to move the capital to Ramciel in Lakes State.

The land issue links also to the broader and more important question of Kiir’s level of popular and political support in Equatoria. Whether the president will seek to accommodate the views of the federalists or instead to attack them is presently the most consequential leadership decision he has to make.

‘Reserve army’

Rumbek and Wau are Kiir’s natural line of retreat should his SPLA-Juba faction lose ground politically and militarily elsewhere in the country.

His choice of headquarters will be informed by political developments in Equatoria, as well as by security developments, in light of the difficulties the army has been having maintaining troops at frontline areas.

Financial and supply problems prompted mass desertions along several fronts in June, with many troops returning home to Bahr al Ghazal. The desertions were not necessarily the result of outright disloyalty, but did demonstrate that SPLA is limited in its ability to fight a prolonged war beyond its base areas of support.

In an interview in early July, the deputy governor of Northern Bahr al Ghazal confirmed that many of the Mathiang Anyor troops had returned recently to the state from frontline areas elsewhere, calling on them to return their weapons.

In Upper Nile, the SPLA successfully recruited many youths of the Dinka Abilang to defend oil fields around Paloich, where they are close to their own civilian support networks, but SPLA had a harder time maintaining a garrison in Nasser in Nuer territory to the southeast, where they were subject to regular guerilla attacks and without adequate resupply.

What this pattern suggests is that while the government is able to recruit and arm local youths en masse, it is not necessarily able to maintain them permanently in the field far from their home areas.

The example of the Mathiang Anyor is also revealing of structural issues that the Kiir government faces. The name refers essentially to a locally recruited force given SPLA uniforms and issued guns by SPLA, though not necessarily formally enrolled in the army.

In a speech in Aweil in February, Governor Paul Malong claimed credit for helping capture Bor, saying, “I was in Bor together with Mathiang Anyor” – though at the time he was only a civilian governor and had no place in the army chain of command.

President Kiir in a speech rejected accusations that such troops were his ‘private army’, instead referring to them as the nation’s ‘reserve army’. At the same time, he acknowledged they were not provisioned by the army command: “They were not given armament, they were not been given salaries, they were not been given food, but they were fed by the people.”

What this reveals is that the Mathiang Anyor were not structurally well integrated into the SPLA, at least not in the early stages of the conflict.

Other units likewise do not report through the formal army chain of command, including JEM troops in Bentiu, Ugandan (UPDF) troops in Bor and Gumbo, and SSLA, an ex-rebel militia in Unity State. In eastern Jonglei, the commander of the SSDF-Cobra faction deals primarily with the presidency. In Juba, the Tigers’ commander reports directly to the president.

These armed units are accountable not to the army but to other actors, whether that be a governor, a security official, the president himself, or a particular commander. SSLA, for instance, is strongly linked to the Unity State governor.

Kiir’s fear is that this coalition may not hold under changed political circumstances. In particular, his political position is weakening in Equatoria, as the federalist movement gains traction, and in Jonglei, where the Dinka Bor no longer face the same immediate security threats.

These political changes increase Kiir’s military exposure in Juba. This reduces his options for moving against his federalist opponents, the so-called ‘internal front’.

Earlier this month one of his generals warned that Equatorians would be ‘slaughtered like chickens’ in the event of a rebellion. But privately Kiir and his loyalists must doubt whether they would be able to crush an uprising in Equatoria.

A move to Rumbek or Wau would put the president farther from his political opponents and closer to what he himself has described as his ‘reserve army’.

Ironically, this in itself might be a move toward federalism and decentralization, with the commercial capital remaining in Equatoria and an industrial (oil-producing) capital developing in Upper Nile apart from a political capital in Bahr al Ghazal. 

File photo: Gen. Salva Kiir (center) with Governor of Western Bahr al Ghazal Rizig Zacharia (left)

The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made are the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.