How well did South Sudan prepare for independence from Khartoum?

Although I had been to Southern Sudan many times during the civil war, I tried to come to the new state of South Sudan with an open mind and a simple question. Having become independent some 50 years after most African states, has South Sudan learned from the mistakes of other countries on the continent?

Ask anyone if they are happy to be an independent country and you are rewarded with a huge smile and an overwhelming yes! It is not just the end of an almost 50-year-long civil war.

The great irony is that the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement had fought since 1983 not for Independence, but for a united, democratic, secular Sudan. That at least was the official position. But after its founder, John Garang, was killed in a helicopter crash in 2005, his friends said that Independence was always his ultimate aim.

The question now is how well has the Movement prepared for it? There is a flag, a presidential palace, an international airport and a massive memorial to Garang. But they have not yet agreed on the new country’s name.

The “Republic of South Sudan” is temporary. There is — as in most African countries — huge potential: Oil, water, millions of hectares of fertile land and forests and rich mineral deposits.

Independence Day on July 9 was the mother of all parties, lasting several days. Recovering from the hangover, people are beginning to realise that this infant state should be in emergency post-natal care.

Decisions taken now are critical to the stability, indeed the very survival of the country. But there is no national development plan. No agreement has been reached on how to share the revenue of 500,000 barrels of oil per day with the North.

Most of it is under the South but the pipeline to the coast goes north so Khartoum gets the cheques. Khartoum has not paid the South anything for months. There is no agreement on the border or the status of the disputed Abyei region.

The SPLM is convinced that once agreements are reached with Khartoum, its former imperial power will no longer have an interest in destabilising it.

But a successful South Sudan would be a threat to it. Its very success in achieving Independence might encourage Darfur and other parts of Sudan to rise up or break away. A strong South may back the rebellions in Darfur and the Nuba mountains, the latter a solid SPLM area that ended up on the wrong side of the border but has gone on fighting.

From Khartoum’s point of view, it is better to keep South Sudan weak and dependent. Juba is 1,500 kilometres from the nearest port, Mombasa, with a single lane pothole ridden road for much of the way. There is no railway, the oil pipeline runs through the North and the cost of building one southwards is probably prohibitive.

Not even the Chinese are interested.

And glance around South Sudan’s other borders. To the east, the poorest and most disrupted part of Ethiopia. To the west lie Congo and the Central African Republic. But the borderlands are unplaced and infested with the deadly remnants of Uganda’s rebel movement, the Lord’s Resistance Army.

No hardtop road links Juba to these borders. Southeast lies Kenya but with no road to that border either, and south is Uganda, an ally and the main link to the outside world but with its own hot politics. This is not a nice neighbourhood for an infant to grow up in.

The lack of clear strategy may be explained by three post-natal emergency crises, each of them horrendously complicated:
First, the largest ever mass movement of people in peacetime, the vindictive expulsion of all Southerners from the North. Some four million Southerners lived in the North in 2005 when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed. Since then an estimated three million have headed South but another million are still to come.