SSPDF Chief General Santino Deng Wol is correct about one thing: insecurity destroys development. War closes schools, empties hospitals, destroys roads, displaces populations, and turns communities into permanent humanitarian dependants. But his analysis becomes dangerously incomplete when it treats Upper Nile’s suffering as though conflict were a regional pathology rather than a product of national security choices.
The central question is not simply who has taken up arms. The more important question is: why are some communities treated as victims of insecurity while others are treated as the source of insecurity? The suggestion that the crisis in Bahr el Ghazal is somehow less serious because its people have not collectively turned their guns against the government is a deeply troubling standard. Peace cannot be measured by the absence of open rebellion alone. A population can be living in what amounts to hell on earth, under extreme poverty, hunger, displacement, communal violence, insecurity, collapsed services and state neglect, without firing a single bullet at the government.
The silence of the gun is not necessarily the presence of peace. Across Warrap, Lakes, Northern Bahr el Ghazal and Western Bahr el Ghazal States, communities have endured recurrent intercommunal killings, cattle raids, border conflicts, revenge attacks, displacement, hunger and the collapse of basic services. Warrap particularly has repeatedly been among the country’s worst centres of sub-national violence.
In 2025 alone, hundreds of civilians were reportedly killed and injured in community-based violence in Warrap. In 2026, deadly clashes along the Warrap–Western Bahr el Ghazal frontier displaced thousands. These are not signs of a peaceful region. They are evidence of a region suffering from a profound security and governance crisis. Therefore, the argument that Bahr el Ghazal is peaceful merely because its people have not launched a coordinated armed revolt against Juba is not analysis; it is the political manipulation of the definition of conflict.
The danger is that insecurity is increasingly being measured not by the suffering of civilians, but by the political identity of the victims and the political direction of their guns. If a community fights the government, its suffering becomes a national security emergency. If a community suffers from poverty, hunger, communal violence, militarized repression, and state neglect without fighting the government, its suffering is quietly normalized. That is the architecture of selective outrage.
The people of Upper Nile must not be blamed for fighting for survival while the structural conditions that produce insecurity are ignored. Nor should the people of Bahr el Ghazal be falsely presented as living in peace simply because their suffering has not yet crystallised into a rebellion against the state. The two regions are not enemies. They are both victims of a system that has repeatedly failed to provide equal security, equal protection, equal development and equal citizenship.
The tragedy is that ethnicity is increasingly being used as a political instrument: suffering is selectively recognized, violence is selectively condemned, and communities are selectively securitized. Such a policy does not protect national unity. It manufactures ethnic suspicion and creates the very tribal crisis that leaders claim to fear.
General Santino’s call for peace is therefore welcome, but peace cannot be reduced to the surrender of guns by the oppressed while the state refuses to confront the conditions that produce violence. Peace without justice is merely the management of silence. Development without equal security is merely a political slogan. And national unity built upon the selective suffering of particular communities is not unity at all; it is organised inequality wearing the mask of patriotism.
The people of Upper Nile do not need to be blamed for their survival. The people of Bahr el Ghazal do not need their suffering to be concealed for the sake of a manufactured tribal consensus. Equatoria must not be treated as politically irrelevant simply because it does not fit the current ethnic security calculus. South Sudan does not need a security policy that asks, “Whose people are suffering?” It needs a state that asks, “Why are any of its citizens suffering, and why has the government failed to protect them?”
Until that question is answered honestly, the language of peace will remain a veil over selective governance, and the language of tribal unity will remain a dangerous instrument for dividing citizens into those whose suffering matters and those whose suffering is politically convenient to ignore.
The writer, Juol Nhomngek Daniel, 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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