Opinion| The legacy that Salva Kiir cannot escape

South Sudan’s tragedy is not an accident. It is the legacy of President Salva Kiir, marked by deep betrayals that will outlive his presidency.

At independence in 2011, South Sudan stood at the gates of possibility. A people who had endured generations of war finally raised their flag. The promise was not only freedom, but dignity and self-rule.

Fourteen years later, the dream is in ruins. The state lies hollowed, children grow up in trauma, and sovereignty is mortgaged to neighbours and foreign patrons. This collapse is not abstract. It has a name: Salva Kiir. His legacy is not liberation but betrayal, a record of choices and patterns that South Sudanese will never forget.

For a long time, I resisted personalizing our country’s challenges and regarded Salva only as a symptom of a deeper problem. But for the seven specific failures outlined below, I have made a temporary exception, for history’s sake, I put a name and face to them.

  1. Salva Kiir and the death of Garang: While there is no conclusive evidence, allegations linger that Salva Kiir and Yoweri Museveni played a role in Garang’s death. The way the investigations were handled gave rise to conspiracy theories. Many argue that Museveni’s hold over Salva comes from the “dirty secrets” of that tragedy, which explains Uganda’s unrivalled influence in Juba. These allegations have never been proven, but the political effect is real: Many South Sudanese perceive Kiir’s dependency on Ugandan protection as the price of silence.
  2. Salva Kiir and the destruction of state institutions: Fearing the SPLM/A as an institution that could challenge his power, Salva dismantled it. He dismantled the state itself, importing Sudanese intelligence operatives and Ugandan loyalists, placing them in key institutions to paralyse governance, loot and collapse the economy, and divide communities. He preferred to rule over ruins rather than risk institutions that could check his power. This was not an accident. It was designed so Salva Kiir could rule a graveyard without challenge.
  3. Salva Kiir and the squandered ethnic power: The liberation struggle left the Jieng with unmatched dominance in security, the economy, and state structures. History shows that when any group held such power, they built something lasting or at least temporarily benefitted their people, whether white South Africans under apartheid or the Banyankole of Uganda. Salva turned this once-in-a-generation advantage into mass death, displacement, and despair, leaving the Jieng resented, resentful and victimised at the same time. Today, Dinka themselves are among the primary victims, carrying the stigma of a regime that devoured them, too.
  4. Salva Kiir turned friends into enemies, and enemies into friends: Norway, Ethiopia, the US, Eritrea, and others shed blood, treasure, and political capital to help South Sudan become a country. Today, Salva treats them with hostility. Salva Kiir turned those friends into enemies. He treated their warnings as meddling and their sacrifices as disposable. Meanwhile, he opened South Sudan’s doors to Egypt, Sudan, the UAE, Russia, and China, states that either armed Khartoum during the liberation struggle or profited from our suffering. In Juba, those who once supported our freedom are mistrusted, while those who bankrolled our oppression now sit at our table, stripping our resources as reward. Under Salva Kiir, alliances are not about principle or memory, but survival and cash. Today, the best our former friends like the US and Israel offer us is the export of their criminals and discarded problems.
  5. Salva Kiir and selling out the country before his death: Salva is determined to bury South Sudan before he goes to his grave. Salva Kiir’s vision is not a country alive after him, but a country buried before him. Fertile lands, the side of Rwanda, have been leased out to foreign states to grow animal feed for their cattle while our children starve. Natural resources have been mortgaged underground through oil-backed loans for decades. Mining rights have been granted across borders with little regulation, enriching his inner circle. To ensure the ruin is complete, he is grooming the most incompetent and corrupt among his allies as successors, guaranteeing that the fire will burn long after he is gone.
  6. Salva Kiir and the future he stole: South Sudan now ranks among the world’s worst places to be a child. More than 2.8 million children are out of school. Under-five mortality is among the highest in the world. Young people are more likely to be jobless than employed, more likely to be traumatised than hopeful. Entire generations are growing up in a crime scene, where violence and corruption are normal. Salva Kiir has created a giant psychiatric ward called South Sudan, where trauma breeds trauma and despair is inherited. The measure of leadership is the future it builds. Salva Kiir’s measure is a future stolen before it could begin.
  7. Salva Kiir’s insatiable hunger for destruction: As if internal collapse was not enough, Salva Kiir now seeks to forcibly transplant Palestinians into South Sudan, weaponising their displacement to repay Israel for its support during the war with Khartoum, for supplying him with surveillance technology he has used to silence and kill his own citizens, and now in anticipation of lethal technologies that will be deployed to hunt and assassinate opponents anywhere in the country. This is a profound betrayal of liberation solidarity, for even though Palestinians once stood with our oppressor, that can never justify betraying their historic struggle to live free in their land. By offering South Sudan as a resettlement site, Salva is not only enabling what the world condemns as ethnic cleansing, but he is opening our borders to Hamas operatives, Iranian proxies, and Muslim Brotherhood factions that destabilised Sudan for decades. This threatens to turn South Sudan into a battleground of Israel-Iran rivalries, resurrecting the same “Arab hegemony” we fought for fifty years to dismantle. Also, by accepting or abetting the uprooting of Palestinians from their homeland, South Sudan would place itself in direct contradiction with the principled positions of African nations such as Egypt, Algeria, and South Africa, who have long defended Palestine’s right to self-determination. Salva Kiir will not be remembered as a liberator, but as the man who traded one people’s freedom for another’s subjugation and invited global conflicts into the heart of Africa.

Salva is no longer just a bad and failed leader. He is an existential danger to South Sudan’s survival as a country and a people. He is the single greatest threat to our national security and sovereignty. The Constitution of South Sudan places a duty on every citizen to defend the nation from such a threat. The choice now is not between violence and nonviolence, but between obedience and disobedience, between complicity and confrontation.

The writer, Dr. Remember Miamingi, is a human rights lawyer, governance specialist, and advisor to the Reclaim Campaign. He has worked extensively across Africa on transitional justice, human rights, and civic engagement.

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.