South Sudan’s ruling party SPLM has acknowledged a number of fresh defections of senior members to the SPLM-in-Opposition, though it downplays these losses as ‘insignificant’.

Senior members including Gen. Dau Aturjong, MP Richard Mulla, Amb. Francis Nazario as well as party secretariat officials including Yien Mathew, Puot Kang, Choul Lam and Duer Tut have publicly announced their defection to the opposition group headed by Dr Riek Machar.

Acting SPLM Secretary General Anne Itto on Tuesday said the defections do not affect the performance of the party’s secretariat.

“There are four from the General Secretariat that have defected,” she said, referring to Yien Mathew, Puot Kang, Choul Lam and Duer Tut. “And I am sure there are some at the states' level of secretariats and counties and even lower that even we did not have time to determinate and maybe with the registration we may be able to collect information of those,” Itto said.

Duer Tut, the acting secretary for administration flew to Egypt, Pout Kang was the deputy to Itto, and Choul Lam was protocol officer in the in the office of the former secretary general Pagan Amum.

Yien Mathew, who was SPLM spokesperson, announced his resignation and denounced the chairman Salva Kiir as a dictator in the party.

“Some of you are wondering why members of parliament and members of the SPLM secretariat are leaving Juba to go to and join the SPLM/A-in-Opposition, but I wanted to let you know the absence of Duer Tut, Mathew, Pout and Choul Lam has not made any difference at all, their absence is of no significant for us,” Itto said.

She accused the four secretariat officials of having poor relation with their comrades in the party: “We only kept them because they are the members and we felt that they could be trained on how to work with us, but otherwise they would have not been [kept].”

According to reports last week, so far more than 18 members from the national parliament have also announced their defections to the opposition group.

South Sudan’s parliament earlier this week asked all political parties in the parliament to submit lists of their members in the parliament who have defected so that action can be taken by the parliament.

Itto stressed that most people in the party still support Chairman Salva Kiir: “If you look at the percentage of this people [defecting] they are about four, and there are about 200 employees in this secretariat – what does that percentage of mean? It is not really significant.”

The acting party secretary-general replaced Pagan Amum, who now heads the ‘third bloc’ opposition group known as SPLM Former Detainees or the Group of Eleven.

She said that people are free to join the party at any time. But she argued that those leaving SPLM now are just looking for positions  in the coming interim government, which is likely to be formed in the near future.

Itto said last month SPLM launched a registration campaign, saying it will build a database to know the party membership. She said four states have already registered, though they did not manage to reach the citizens who have fled to live at the United Nation camp sites.