President Kiir has breached the peace deal he has with opposition leader Riek Machar by appointing his defence minister.
In 2018, South Sudan President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar’s forces signed a peace agreement.
This agreement ended five years of civil war that killed 400,000 people and triggered one of Africa’s biggest refugee crises.
One of the terms of the agreement was that the defence minister was to be selected by the opposition party.
However, not only did President Kiir appoint a member of his party as defence minister, but he also sacked the former minister.
According to a decree read on state media, he has breached a peace deal.
Kiir fired defence minister Angelina Teny, who is also the wife of First Vice President Machar.
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“The appointment of Chol Thon as a minister of defence is unilateral and a new blatant violation of the peace agreement,” says Puok Both Baluang, Machar’s spokesperson.
Also, he sacked the interior minister, re-igniting long-standing disagreements over how power is supposed to be shared.
A Solution
A meeting was called after the president sacked the minister earlier this month.
However, the meeting aimed at resolving the rift between Kiir and Machar ended in a deadlock.
Therefore, there might be a likely paralysis in the implementation of the peace deal, says Boboya James, a policy analyst at the Juba-based Institute of Social Policy and Research.
“(Kiir) wants to have all the powerful institutions,” says James.
“What he is doing is to consolidate that level of power between now and towards the elections.”
The peace is meant to culminate in a national election at the end of 2024.
