Spare South Sudan the shame, it’s the state that never learned to pay its bills

From 2005, when South Sudan was made a semi-autonomous region and guaranteed a referendum on independence within six years following the peace agreement that ended its long, bloody war against the Khartoum regime, and immediately after July 2011 when it gained independence, the country was a magnet for Eritrean, Kenyan, Ugandan, and Ethiopian businesses and small traders.

They fell over each other in the scramble for the South Sudan windfall. For nearly half a decade, people from what became South Sudan had been refugees in large numbers in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, where they had been harboured, fed, and became brothers and sisters.

When they got their country and fortune, it was time to share with the extended East African family. All went well until it was time to collect what they were owed — and, of course, after the war broke out again in December 2013.

In the past 10 years, I have hardly met a single East African entrepreneur who gambled on South Sudan and doesn’t have a heartbreak story.

With the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) playing an oversized military role in South Sudan’s fight against Sudan, its nationals rushed in large numbers to claim the spoils when victory came.

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From running market stalls, car repair garages, and small power distribution services, to hotels, they had their fingers in everything.

Kenyans did small and medium businesses too but went bigger, with banking and airlines. They suffered the same fate, especially after the 2013 crisis.

In 2018, Uganda cleared Ush151 billion (about $41 million at the time based on historical exchange rates) on behalf of South Sudan to Ugandan traders and companies who supplied goods and services between 2008 and 2010 and had been stiffed by Juba.

The debt was treated as a loan to the South Sudanese government, with an expectation of repayment with an interest of six per cent after the first year. That amount did not cover all the debt owed to Ugandan traders and companies, and some are still seeking compensation.

When the South Sudan economy cratered after the December 2013 relapse, Kenyan banks that were holding vast sums of dollars they had been unable to repatriate were forced to act as South Sudan’s unofficial central banker.

There were (probably exaggerated) reports of the Juba government sending armed soldiers with empty bags to the banks to be filled with dollars because it was bankrupt.

Seeking the upper hand in the diplomatic efforts to resolve the war between the South Sudan factions, Nairobi came up with a shrewd deal. In a version of the Uganda deal, it offered guarantees to the Kenyan banks for the money being “borrowed” by Juba. In return, Nairobi bought the ears of the South Sudan power elite.

There is a dark underside to this drama. With the uncertainty and rampant corruption in South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya have seen lords of questionable money from Juba stashed in their banks and real estate.

There is no Kampala or Nairobi suburb in which corrupt South Sudanese figures have not invested in posh homes.

In some, notoriously polygamous South Sudanese generals have several houses where they have set up their various wives and many children.

It has all led to unfavourable stereotypes about the South Sudanese in East Africa, which some of its more thoughtful scholars say is informed by a limited understanding of the peculiarities that birthed the country.

As several have schooled me, South Sudan achieved independence in ways few other African countries did. For starters, they say, South Sudan did not exist as an independent state or a colonial protectorate before its modern-day independence in 2011, the way Eritrea – or British Somaliland – did, for example.

The idea of collecting wealth at the centre, then distributing it to the regions and sharing it among the elite, was therefore still poorly formed by 2005.

There were two main trends in South Sudanese nationalism: the pan-African pan-Sudan stream helmed by the charismatic Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement leader John Garang de Mabior, who died in a Ugandan helicopter crash on July 30, 2005.

Garang’s vision was of a “New Sudan”, governed in a federal system where regions would have significant autonomy, not separation of southern Sudan.

Then there was the more nativist, anti-Arabist, predatory nationalism, which is dominant today.

The political class that came to power had also mostly lived in the neighbouring countries of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, and even where they were welcome, they saw the local citizens getting a larger cut than them. In power at home in independent South Sudan, they are motivated to settle scores and get a larger slice than their former hosts who didn’t share with them equally. “It shouldn’t be unexpected,” one of them said.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans.” X(Twitter) @cobbo3