After writing my article on how the SPLM became the problems of South Sudan, I planned to put politics aside and read a book by Maksymilian Del Mar, Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, on the legal philosophy of Neil MacCormick (1941–2009), one of the twentieth century’s most important legal philosophers and one of Scotland’s most influential public intellectuals. The book, running to 643 pages, was waiting for me.
Before opening it, I went on Facebook for what I intended to be my last scroll of the day. Then I encountered a statement by Dr. John Madit that stopped me. The statement is: “The greatest civilizations such as China and the USA were not formed out of consensus. It was one man who saw the best direction for the nation and did everything necessary to ensure that all followed that route.”
I found the statement historically untenable and conceptually dangerous. It reduces the complicated history of state formation to the mythology of the Great Man. China and the United States were not constructed because one individual possessed a divine map and compelled everyone else to follow it. Their histories are, in very different ways, histories of contestation, compromise, institutions, constitutional ordering, political bargaining, conflict, reform and negotiated consensus.
The American constitutional order itself emerged from intense disagreement among competing interests at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Federalists and Anti-Federalists contested the distribution of power, while compromises, including the Great Compromise, and subsequently the Bill of Rights helped make the constitutional settlement politically viable. Abraham Lincoln did not personally manufacture the United States; rather, he presided over a constitutional crisis in which the preservation of the Union became the central national question. Roosevelt did not invent America either; the New Deal was a political response constructed through institutions, legislation and public contestation.
China presents a different model, but it does not validate the “one man built the nation” thesis either. Mao, Deng and later Chinese leaders operated through a vast party-state apparatus, political institutions, bureaucracies and ideological frameworks. Deng Xiaoping’s reform era was consequential precisely because it redirected an institutional system toward a new consensus around modernization, stability and economic development, not because Deng simply ordered China to become modern.
The historical lesson is therefore much larger than the personalities who occupy the photographs in history books. A leader may identify a direction; institutions make the direction durable. A leader may initiate reform; consensus gives reform legitimacy. A leader may command; only institutions can sustain command after the commander is gone. That distinction matters enormously for South Sudan.
History is littered with states and federations that fractured when their political elites could no longer agree on how power, resources, territory and identity should be accommodated. Yugoslavia is perhaps the most dramatic modern example. The Soviet Union collapsed amid profound political, economic and national tensions. Czechoslovakia separated peacefully when its political leadership concluded that competing visions could no longer be reconciled within one federal arrangement. Gran Colombia and the Federal Republic of Central America similarly demonstrate that political unions cannot survive indefinitely when their constituent political interests cease to share a workable settlement.
Consensus does not mean that everybody thinks alike. It means that competing interests agree on the rules of the political game. That is the point Dr. Madit’s statement misses. The United States and China have radically different political systems, but each developed mechanisms for organising national purpose and managing political power.
The United States rests constitutionally on separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, elections, judicial review and the rule of law. China, however, developed a centralised party-state model based on Communist Party leadership, political consultation, bureaucratic coordination and successive national development programmes. These models should not be confused with one another, nor should China’s system be romanticised as democratic. But neither can it honestly be reduced to the proposition that one man simply “saw the best direction” and forced an entire civilisation to follow him.
Even where extraordinary leaders appear, they operate inside, and are constrained or enabled by, institutions, historical circumstances and political coalitions. This is why personalised politics is so dangerous in a fragile state such as South Sudan. When the country begins to confuse the individual with the institution, the ruler with the state, or the party leader with the party itself, constitutional government becomes a personal possession rather than a public trust. That is precisely how liberation movements can gradually become instruments of personalised power.
The fundamental question for South Sudan is therefore not “Who is the man who knows the best direction?” It is: “What political system allows South Sudanese citizens to collectively determine the direction of their country, and peacefully correct it when that direction is wrong?” That is also why I find MacCormick’s world of law and political philosophy more useful tonight than Facebook mythology.
Nations are not built by men alone. Men come and go; institutions, constitutional rules and political settlements are what remain. And if South Sudan is ever to escape the cycle in which the SPLM’s internal political crisis repeatedly becomes a national crisis, we must stop searching for a political Messiah and start building a political system in which no individual is powerful enough to become the system itself.
The writer is a South Sudanese constitutional lawyer, academic, and political figure. He studied law at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. He is an independent legal researcher and constitutional expert and serves as a lecturer and Deputy Dean of the College of Law at Starford International University in Juba. He is also a member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO).
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.
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