Beyond the daily struggles for survival, a deeper existential fear looms over South Sudan, a fear shared by regional powers whose stability is inextricably linked to its own: the carnage his sudden departure could trigger. The question is not if Kiir will depart the scene, through death, infirmity, or forced exit, because age and mortality are democracies that spare no one, but what nightmare his departure will unleash.
Let us be clear: this is not the anxiety of grief, but the dread of the abyss. The fear is not for Kiir, but for the chaos that may engulf us in his wake. For South Sudan, a nation born in hope and baptised in blood, Kiir is the still point in a turning world of violence. Should Gen Salva Kiir die without a credible and widely acceptable succession plan, this will not be just a political event but a geological one, exposing the profound emptiness upon which the state has been built. The departure of its founding president threatens to unravel not just its own fragile sovereignty but to destabilise an already volatile region.
To understand what South Sudan will become without Kiir, one must first understand what it is with him. The regime presided over by Salva Kiir is not a government in any conventional sense, but a precarious coalition of rivals and ethnic entrepreneurs bound by a web of patronage, fear, and mutual complicity in the systematic looting of the state.
Much like Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, the state apparatus functions not as a servant of the public, but as a resource-dispensing mechanism for the elite. Kiir himself is the linchpin of this entire structure, the ultimate arbiter and patron. His authority, forged in the bush and consolidated through civil war, is the glue holding this fragile equilibrium together; his sudden removal would be akin to pulling the keystone from a crumbling arch. Without his singular ability to distribute oil revenues, arbitrate disputes, and deploy force, the mutual distrust currently suppressed for survival would erupt into open conflict. This is not governance; it is the management of a vast protection racket. And such rackets cannot survive the death of their don.
In principle, the constitutional architecture, as buttressed by the peace agreement, provides a clear succession blueprint for the republic. Yet, Gen. Kiir has consistently governed from the shadows of this very framework, invoking its powers while ignoring its constraints. He has systematically hollowed out the peace deal and eroded the institutions meant to ensure stability, leaving behind a constitutional carcass, a parchment reality that offers no viable path forward in a moment of crisis.
For the constitutional and peace agreements to have any force, they presuppose a cabinet and military capable of steering the nation through a crisis. Yet, President Kiir has cultivated not a government of loyalists, but a court of opportunists, a coalition bound by patronage, silenced by the fear of retribution, and paralysed by mutual suspicion. This fragile equilibrium can only hold under the strongman who engineered it. His absence would not be a transition, but a trigger. Compounding this, Kiir has masterfully populated his court with rival factions, whispering conflicting promises of succession to different lieutenants. He is not preparing for a transfer of power, but meticulously scripting a succession battle, ensuring that his final act sets the stage for the regime’s self-immolation.
One might hope the SPLM, as a party, could rise to provide stability. This hope is a profound misreading of reality. To call the SPLM a “ruling party” is a category error. It is not a political organisation but the institutional embodiment of Kiir’s personal authority, a hollow shell legitimising a patronage network. The SPLM long ago ceased to be a political institution with an independent ideology or structure; it is a phantom party, a hollow brand animated solely by Gen. Kiir’s will and operating solely at his behest. His demise will not create a power vacuum within the party; it will obliterate the party itself. The historical parallel is stark: as with Siad Barre’s Somali National Front in 1991, the SPLM will evaporate, fracturing along the very ethnic and personal fault lines it has long papered over. The SPLM’s dissolution will be the political big bang from which a multitude of new, violently competing entities will be born.
One might entertain the notion of the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) as a potential stabilising force. This, however, is a dangerous fantasy. The SSPDF is a national army in name only; in reality, it is a precarious confederation of ethnic militias draped in a single uniform, its command structure a fiction maintained solely by Gen. Kiir’s patronage and his delicate balancing of competing warlords. He has managed this volatile equilibrium by rotating commands and strategically dispensing resources, ensuring no single faction grows strong enough to challenge him, while all remain weak enough to need him. His departure will be the catalyst for its disintegration.
The historical parallels are stark and terrifying: the fragmentation of Tito’s Yugoslav army or the implosion of Gaddafi’s Libyan military. South Sudan’s forces are, if anything, even more primed for rupture. The nominal integration of rival factions has been cosmetic, leaving parallel command structures and divided loyalties festering within the same barracks. When the central authority of the patron-in-chief vanishes, so too will the illusion of unity. Commanders will face a stark choice between a hollow state and the survival of their communities, and they will choose the latter. The Nuer White Army will remobilise; Dinka tribal militias will revert to their generals. The Equatorian militias will smell blood and go for regionalism. The result will be the pulverisation of the state’s monopoly on violence, as these armed factions splinter to control oil fields, supply routes, and territory, transforming a political crisis into a full-scale, multi-front civil war.
What about the opposition groups? Would they offer a credible alternative stabilising force post Kiir? NO! The nominal political opposition offers not a stabilising alternative, but a fractured mirror of the regime it seeks to replace. It is a constellation of ambitions, not a coherent movement, its figures less united by a common vision than by a shared enemy-Gen.Kiir.
While some of the opposition forces would inevitably attempt to seize the moment, their authority is itself a contested domain. The result would be a rapid, violent kaleidoscope of local power consolidations. State Governors would shed their bureaucratic skins to reveal the warlords beneath; disgruntled generals would carve out autonomous fiefdoms; ethnic self-defence forces would mutate into predatory militias.
This is not mere speculation, but a pattern written in the blood of the region. The model is not only Somalia’s past but Sudan’s present, a stark testament to how the dissolution of a centralised autocracy can unleash a war of all against all, plunging a nation into a humanitarian abyss.
The repercussions would ripple across borders with catastrophic force. A refugee crisis of unimaginable scale would overwhelm the fragile hospitality of Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, while shattering the precarious peace in Sudan itself. The Nile Basin, the region’s lifeline, would become an arc of instability, as the conflagration in South Sudan spills across its borders, drawing in regional actors and their proxies.
The fundamental tragedy lies in the political economy of violence that Gen Kiir has meticulously cultivated over the years. For many of the opposition’s various factions, armed rebellion has become less a political instrument than a business model, a brutal arbitrage where violence is the currency for inclusion in a resource-sharing arrangement. They are, in essence, entrepreneurs of violence, not architects of a state. Their goal is not to build a nation, but to control its lucrative pieces: the oil fields, the border crossings, the customs posts, etc.
In the absence of a central power, these entrepreneurs would not coordinate; they would scramble. Alliances would shift with the desert winds, and the landscape would be consumed by pitched battles between rival opposition blocs. The hollowed-out institutions offer no bulwark against this tide. When power is truly up for grabs, it is not ideologies that surge, but personalities, and the personalities poised to inherit South Sudan’s chaos are ill-prepared for anything resembling governance. They are prepared only for the fight.
While the precise contours of the future remain uncertain, the trajectory of South Sudan points toward a cataclysm. The nation stands at a precipice, facing two distinct paths to dissolution, differing not in their ultimate destination, but in their velocity of despair.
The first is the path of Implosion. A sudden succession crisis, triggered by a power vacuum at the centre, would see the capital, Juba, become a theatre of war within hours. Rival claimants, backed by their respective security apparatuses, would turn the streets into a battleground, shattering the fragile peace. The result would be an immediate and violent unweaving of the national fabric, a rapid descent into a multi-fronted civil war with no central authority. This scenario would not be a contained conflict; it would be a regional contagion, drawing in neighbouring states to secure their interests and prop up proxies, transforming a national tragedy into an international crisis.
The second, more insidious path, is that of dissolution. Here, a managed transition or a foreign military-backed consensus might project a veneer of stability. Yet, this would be a phantom state, a government devoid of the legitimacy and revolutionary capital that has, however tenuously, held the centre. As patronage networks fray and economic foundations crumble, the state’s authority would simply recede from the periphery inward. South Sudan would not explode, but rather atrophy, collapsing in slow motion, a decay just gradual enough to evade sustained international alarm, yet irreversible by the time its totality is understood.
Both scenarios converge on the same harrowing outcome: the effective end of South Sudan as a unified political entity. For its citizens, this portends a descent into an abyss of mass atrocities and famine on a genocidal scale. Regionally, it would unleash a tsunami of human displacement, overwhelming Uganda and Kenya and pulling fragile neighbours like Ethiopia and Sudan into its destabilising vortex.
For the international community, the African Union, IGAD, the UN, and the Troika powers, this represents the total repudiation of a decades-long state-building project. The legacy of South Sudan’s hard-won independence would be irrevocably scarred by catastrophic failure.
This looming spectre demands a fundamental reckoning. The prevailing strategy of managing a corrosive status quo, of recycling peace agreements that merely reshuffle a discredited elite, is a bankrupt endeavour. The most severe existential threat South Sudan now faces is the absence of a plan for its own continuity. The South Sudanese, supported by their international partners, must therefore force this difficult dialogue onto the agenda, compelling a conversation focused not on anointing a successor but on forging resilient, impersonal institutions capable of outlasting any single individual. The alternative is not merely state failure; it is the orchestrated unravelling of a nation.
To convene this necessary dialogue is not an act of interference, but one of profound regional and international self-interest. South Sudan is not an isolated crisis; it is a fragile vessel at the confluence of East Africa’s most volatile currents. Its fracture would release shockwaves that would radiate outward, inundating its neighbours.
For Sudan, grappling with its own fragile rebirth, the collapse of its southern neighbour would mean a catastrophic reversal: the return of a flood of refugees, the evaporation of vital oil transit revenues, and the emergence of a lawless hinterland from which hostile forces could operate with impunity. Uganda, a stalwart investor in Juba’s stability, would see its strategic capital evaporate, replaced by the intractable costs of cross-border militancy and humanitarian distress. For Kenya and Ethiopia, each navigating their own complex political transitions, a failed South Sudan would present an unmanageable source of refugees, conflict spillover, and regional destabilisation.
The international community, too, faces a reckoning of credibility. The grand project of South Sudanese independence, midwifed with immense diplomatic capital and hope, would be recorded in history as a fleeting experiment, a state that survived barely a decade. The African Union and IGAD would see their meticulously brokered peace agreements rendered null, their authority diminished. The United Nations would confront the stark limits of its most ambitious peacekeeping mission, a testament to the inability of external actors to substitute for a missing national compact.
Therefore, the response must be as structural as the threat is existential. We must advance a tripartite imperative:
First, we must initiate an urgent dialogue on transition, a forum insulated from the venal interests of the day. This must encompass not merely the armed elite, but the authentic voices of civil society, the clergy, the matriarchs, and the community leaders, to forge a consensus on the fundamental rules of political transition.
Second, we must condition all non-humanitarian assistance upon irreversible security sector reform. The international purse must be closed until a verifiable, transparent process is underway to unify the army command and cultivate a professional, national officer corps loyal to the constitution, not to a personality.
Third, IGAD and the AU must publicly embark on contingency planning. This cannot be a whispered exercise in back-channel diplomacy. The development of detailed, actionable blueprints for political mediation, security stabilisation, and humanitarian response must be communicated clearly to Juba’s elite. The very existence of such plans serves as a crucial deterrent, signalling that the region will not be a passive spectator to self-immolation.
There is a Dinka proverb that whispers a warning across the generations: “The night comes whether you prepare for it or not. But those who prepare see the morning.”
South Sudan now stands at dusk, dwelling in the long shadow of its founding general, a nation that has feasted on the politics of personality while starving its institutions. The palace in Juba, with its visible cracks, is a metaphor for the state itself, a structure built on foundations never meant to bear such weight. The engineers identified the flaws; the officials chose to ignore them.
The coming dawn will be brutal for the unprepared. Yet, a slender possibility of redemption remains. It lies not in the futile preservation of a doomed order, but in the courageous use of its impending collapse as the anvil upon which a new, resilient state is forged. The portrait on the wall is a memento mori; all power is transient. The ultimate test of a nation’s sovereignty is whether it can survive its founder.
The night is coming. The house is cracking. The time for South Sudan, and those who hold its fate in their hands, to prepare for the morning is perilously short.
The writer, Dr. Remember Miamingi, is a South Sudanese expert in governance and human rights, as well as a political commentator. He is currently based in South Africa and can be contacted via email at remember.miamingi@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.