As I sat under a tree today, reflecting on the future of South Sudan, I deliberately looked backwards to Sudan from 1956 to 2011. What struck me was not merely the difference between two flags, but the disturbing resemblance between two political trajectories.
Sudan entered independence in 1956 without a durable constitutional settlement capable of managing its immense political, ethnic, religious and regional diversity. Its constitutional order repeatedly moved through transitional charters, constitutions, military interventions and peace agreements. The 1956 Transitional Constitution was followed by the 1973 Constitution, the 1985 transitional arrangement, the 1998 Constitution and, after the CPA, the 2005 Interim National Constitution. Yet constitutional replacement did not cure the deeper problem: the struggle to construct a legitimate state in which power was genuinely shared.
The Sudanese tragedy was therefore not simply that governments changed. It was that the state remained vulnerable to centralization, elite capture, militarization, regional exclusion and identity-based political mobilization. Riverain political elites and successive ruling parties, including the NUP, Umma, DUP and later the NIF/NCP, operated within a state whose institutions repeatedly failed to accommodate its enormous diversity. The South, Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, the Beja areas and others experienced different forms of marginalization and conflict.
Then came South Sudan. Independence in 2011 was supposed to be a constitutional rupture with that history, not its continuation under a different flag. Yet South Sudan has remained governed through a transitional constitutional order for its entire independent existence, while the permanent constitutional settlement envisaged by the peace process remains unfinished. That is where the historical warning becomes uncomfortable.
The R-ARCSS was designed to break this cycle precisely. It links peace, power-sharing, security-sector reform, constitution-making, institutional reform and elections. The 2005 Sudanese constitutional settlement itself recognized decentralization, diversity, power-sharing and constitutional supremacy; the R-ARCSS similarly seeks to construct institutions capable of preventing political competition from becoming another armed contest for state capture.
The danger today is therefore not merely whether South Sudan holds elections. The deeper question is what constitutional order will govern the country after the ballot boxes are closed? The recent decision to delink the December 2026 elections from completion of the permanent constitution has intensified precisely that question.
The EU has publicly noted that the amendments moved elections onto the Transitional Constitution and raised concerns about the process by which the peace agreement was amended. The African Union continues to call for full and faithful implementation of the R-ARCSS, while recent ISS Africa analysis has warned about the consequences of postponing key peace-agreement reforms until after elections. This is the historical trap South Sudan must not walk into blindly.
A temporary constitutional arrangement can become permanent in practice without ever becoming permanent in law. Transitional politics can become a permanent political industry. Elections can become a mechanism for reproducing existing power rather than transforming the institutions that distribute it. My concern is therefore simple: if the constitutional foundation remains transitional, while political power becomes increasingly permanent, the country may end up constitutionalising the very imbalance that the peace agreement was designed to dismantle.
The lesson of Sudan is brutal: a country can possess constitutions, parliaments, elections, peace agreements and governments and still fail to build a state that its citizens regard as genuinely theirs. South Sudan did not separate from Sudan merely to inherit Sudan’s political architecture under a new name.
The real test of independence is not the flag. It is whether the state finally breaks the architecture of exclusion, centralization, and personalized power that produced the wars of the past. History is not destiny. But history becomes a warning when the same political patterns begin appearing again. We should therefore read Sudan’s history not as an obituary, but as a constitutional warning written in advance.
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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