The hottest news item coming out of South Sudan recently was the decision by the government to ask employers of foreigners working in the country to get rid of them by October 15. That gave them just about a month to put their affairs in order and say their good-byes.

The government wants those jobs to go to its citizens. Early information trickling through had non-governmental organisations, private companies, banks, insurance companies, telecommunications companies, petroleum companies, hotels and lodges as the specific targets of the directive. It must have caused panic among foreigners working there. It is one of those situations one wouldn’t want to be caught up in.

Many commentators reacted with dismay. Some wondered why the government would do that in the face of a looming famine. Others, criticising the decision as precipitate, pointed to the country’s well-known lack of trained and experienced human resources to emphasise how wrong-headed it is.

According to media sources, the advocacy group Global Witness declared the decision “disturbing” and, in indignant tones, accused the government of, among other things, “attempting to expel trained aid workers at a time of a grave humanitarian crisis” in “total disregard for the lives of the 1.3 million citizens” who are internally displaced.

Soon enough, however, the country’s Information Minister Michael Makuei came out to clarify. His explanation suggested that the critics could have been just as rash in decrying the decision as the government they were attacking might have been in making it.

According to Mr Makuei, the ban applies to foreigners who are employed in jobs that South Sudanese can do. He, however, did not go into the details of how the decision had been arrived at. It is therefore difficult to say with certainty what factors influenced it or how long it had been under consideration.

However, for watchers of countries emerging from conflict, if experiences from elsewhere are anything to go by, South Sudan has followed a familiar pattern.

Such countries emerge out of conflict with neither the capacity to respond to even the most mundane of their citizens’ social and other needs, nor the institutions to regulate or monitor consistently the activities of the good Samaritans who arrive in droves to lend a helping hand.

In due course, those who came in to help often begin to feel and behave as though the assistance they render entitles them to have a say in how decisions are made, and much more. Soon enough, tensions begin to emerge between them and local officials with regard to who has the right or the experience or even the skills to decide what happens, when it happens, how it happens, and where it happens.

In cases where governments are weak and disjointed or even happy to outsource some of their roles and responsibilities to their “partners,” the relationship blossoms, albeit at a cost: The imperative to develop local capacity is forgotten, receives only lip-service from the authorities and their partners, or is invoked in ad hoc and intermittent fashion.

Within the Great Lakes neighbourhood, a visit to eastern DR Congo provides ample opportunity to observe this in practice.

At a recent seminar in Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, the local political and intellectual elite complained rather loudly about foreigners who had taken over their country and seemed to want to decide everything for them. I have occasionally heard South Sudanese and some expatriates working in their country make similar comments.

However, where governments are strong-willed and have clear ideas about what they must do to take charge and lead the reconstruction process, relations with “partners” can sour and acquire an adversarial flavour, and could end in the authorities taking drastic action to try and reclaim their authority.

This is what happened in Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsi. Feeling suffocated and keen to assert its authority and the right to set the reconstruction agenda, the new government took steps that saw hundreds of foreign NGOs, among them one-man briefcase outfits, pack up and leave the country. It was a courageous move that, nonetheless, caused lasting bitterness and hostility among some powerful and vocal actors.

NGOs and humanitarians are hardly the only groups that seek to take advantage of authority and governance vacuums.

Fortune seekers, bona fide investors and fly-by-night cowboys, foreign and local, do the same. Post-conflict contexts usually have abundant money making opportunities, but their governments have no capacity to ensure that those who seek to amass fortunes fulfil their tax and other obligations, let alone respect local labour laws.

One of the consequences of lack of regulatory capacity is the streaming in of foreigners with ready skills and appropriate connections, causing locals to feel aggrieved at being left out.

Some weak governments, acting under pressure from their citizens to reverse such situations, or reacting to intolerable direct challenges to their authority, usually lash out and ask the offending foreigners to “go home.”

Foolhardy though it looks, and possibly is, South Sudan’s sledgehammer decision likely had to do with wanting some breathing space.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]