Some leaders earn power at the ballot box. In South Sudan, Dr. Riek Machar Teny earns it by butchering civilians and burning villages, towns, and installations, then walks away with the peace deal. That cycle is now repeating itself, and Washington’s instincts, rooted in genuine goodwill, are today arriving dressed as coercion: the same mistake, wearing a new uniform, mistaking a troublemaker’s ability to keep forcing his way back to the table for a mandate to lead.
The signals from the diplomatic corps are hard to miss. Several embassies have quietly withdrawn staff from Juba; others threaten to follow, and the U.S. Embassy has relocated its visa services to Uganda and Kenya, with Canada following suit. Coming chiefly from TROIKA nations, these read less like logistics and more like pressure campaigns aimed at Juba. If this were done in the interest of the downtrodden masses, it would be received with relief. Instead, it comes as a reward to the very person who wrecked the country.
We acknowledge that the United States has every right to call itself South Sudan’s midwife. The 2002 Sudan Peace Act paved the way to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and, in 2011, to independence. Since then, as Rep. Rich McCormick reminded Secretary Marco Rubio in his August 25, 2026 letter, American taxpayers have poured more than $9.5 billion into sustaining peace and stability in the young Republic.
That history and many of its other commitments to the plight of South Sudanese earn the United States standing as a stakeholder. They do not earn the right to override South Sudan’s sovereignty, tamper with its judicial process, or anoint an unelected figure as President Salva Kiir Mayardit’s co-equal.
Dr. Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon has never won a presidential mandate from the South Sudanese people. What he has built instead is a three-decade record of rupture. His 1991 break with Dr. John Garang de Mabior tore the SPLA/SPLM apart and precipitated the Bor massacre. The Americans tried to mend that rift early: through US Congressman Harry Johnston, the then chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa, they took Dr. Garang and Machar to Washington in October 1993, producing the Washington Declaration of October 22, 1993. It yielded nothing.
Machar, in an attempt to dismantle SPLA/SPLM, fought alongside Khartoum’s forces and, on April 21, 1997, signed the Khartoum Peace Agreement, a snub to the Americans, whom he perceived to have refused to place him above Dr. John Garang. Reconciliation finally came not from Washington but from Nairobi, where Dr. Garang and Machar signed an agreement on January 5, 2002. Reunited on paper, the peace held only until Machar broke ranks again in 2013, igniting the civil war that produced ARCSS, then the J1 shootout, then R-ARCSS in 2018, whose transitional period has been extended repeatedly.
The African Union’s 1364th Peace and Security Council communiqué now sets elections for December 22, 2026, a firm transition end in February 2027, and records fresh violence in Jonglei and Upper Nile rooted in the unresolved Nasir crisis, where Gen. David Majur Dak and his soldiers were killed on March 7, 2025. Dr. Machar, through some of his ministers and generals now standing trial alongside him, is accused of igniting that violence to keep a lapsing agreement artificially alive.
A pattern this consistent points to a method. Instead of letting South Sudan’s courts finish that trial, Washington and its partners, under sustained pressure, are leaning on Juba to release Machar, as if peace could be manufactured by shielding a suspect from justice.
Can peace hold without justice?
A settlement built on impunity would only postpone the next Machar-engineered collapse. Washington keeps rewarding the pattern, treating each crisis as proof that Machar must be re-included as Kiir’s equivalent instead of recognizing him as the recurring variable in South Sudan’s instability.
Solving a political crisis is not a chemistry or math equation where two men must always be balanced against each other. Kiir was elected in 2010. That mandate is imperfect and has been extended by conflicts not entirely of his own making, but it has never been conferred on Machar by any ballot.
R-ARCSS compounds the problem by demanding what may simply be unworkable: folding the tens of thousands of fighters Machar recruited to fight for him into a national army that the country cannot feed, pay, or house alongside its existing forces. No nation, including the United States, has absorbed a rival’s private army wholesale into its own; even the SPLA was never forced into Sudan’s national army. The 2015 Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan already tried this once, letting Machar keep a separate force, and it ended not in integration but in the J1 dogfight. When Kiir balks at repeating that failure, it reads abroad as obstruction. It is closer to realism.
None of this excuses or absolves President Salva Kiir’s government from its flaws. Corruption in Juba is real, salaries go unpaid, and the transitional arrangement itself has become part of the problem. A government bloated with over 50 ministers, five vice presidents, and 550 legislators drains resources that never reach ordinary citizens. Many of the officials benefiting from this arrangement, including in Dr. Machar’s own camp, have every incentive to see R-ARCSS extended forever instead of facing voters who might not re-elect them. That is precisely why elections, the basic benchmark of democracy, deserve support, not resistance. December 2026 should be defended, not deferred again.
But the fix for President Salva Kiir’s failures is not to hand Dr. Riek Machar false parity, nor to strangle humanitarian assistance as a pressure tactic. Aid cuts do not touch the elites enjoying the spoils of conflict; they fall on displaced families and communities already named in the AU’s own “grave concern” over South Sudan’s humanitarian access crisis.
Washington’s National Security Strategy offers the better framework: other nations’ affairs concern America only when they threaten U.S. interests, and it casts America as a mediator in South Sudan’s conflict, not an enforcer of the outcome. Its named threats are migration, drug trafficking, and China. South Sudan appears nowhere on that list. Its Africa section calls for ameliorating conflict and shifting from aid to investment, not enforcement by coercion.
Washington’s own DRC-Rwanda deal, held up in the same strategy as a win, is still shaky. That’s not a strong case for using pressure here too.
America can still be South Sudan’s ally without becoming its overseer. That means engaging as a big brother who is firm, invested, and honest about Juba’s failures, rather than as an enforcer who elevates a serial spoiler to presidential parity.
South Sudanese have earned the right to choose their own leadership through the ballot that IGAD, the AU, and R-ARCSS itself have set for December 2026. Washington’s role is to help protect that date; it must not predetermine its outcome.
Till then, yours truly, Mr. Teetotaler!
The writer, Dr. Sunday de John, holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB) from the University of Nairobi, Faculty of Business and Management Sciences and Faculty of Medicine, respectively. He is the current Chairman of the South Sudan United Front-Progressive and can be reached via drsundayalong4@gmail.com
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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