Issue No. 115

In Juba, Even the Dead Get Appointed

Dead men do not just walk in Juba — they can now be appointed to election task forces. In one of the most bizarre stories in recent memory, Salva Kiir's government selected Steward Sorobo Budia last week for a new task force comprised of signatories to South Sudan's long-collapsed 2018 peace agreement. Three days later, the president's office was forced to admit that Hon. Sorobo—a former politician from a negligible party —had died 6 years prior, making him unable to serve on the farcical "Leadership Body of the Parties Signatory to the R-ARCSS for Dialogue on Election-Related Matters."

Any glimmer of legitimacy, popularity or sense of good governance emanating from the labyrinthine Juba cabal managed by Kiir long ago disappeared. But this latest story is particularly eyewatering, summing up the facade that constitutes not only South Sudanese politics, but the state itself. Ghost soldiers are hardly a new phenomenon, but dead men are rarely directly appointed to electoral bodies. Attempting to brush off criticism, the president's press secretary first called the appointment an "unfortunate administrative oversight" and later blamed "various stakeholders" who appointed the late politician after "wide-ranging consultations." The secretary was dismissed shortly after, as was Valetino Dhel Mulueth-- Kiir's chief administrator. Still, it is likely that these two will soon find themselves in another position within the government, so fast and so rapacious is Kiir's shuffling of posts and personnel. Regarding the electoral body, though, it appears that Hon. Sorobo's name was likely plucked from a list without consideration.

South Sudanese have roundly mocked the debacle, despairing at their government's failures and at its inability to even properly rig preparations for non-existent elections. The new leadership body — formed in January — is nominally intended to bypass the electoral instruments of the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS). Today, R-ARCSS is little more than a shell — a vehicle Kiir has used to centralise power in Juba while steadily eroding the opposition. Unsurprisingly, the new "leadership body" has no members of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-In Opposition (SPLM-IO), part of Kiir's systematic culling of officials from the government. Riek Machar-- the SPLM-IO's leader-- remains under house arrest, subject to a kangaroo court over clashes last March in Nasir County between the Nuer self-defence militias known as the White Army and government forces.

Appointing a dead man to this new electoral body only ironically underscores that this government has no interest in delivering the first —and much-delayed —elections in South Sudan. In September 2024, the regime prevaricated again over the elections, delaying the polls that were scheduled for December until the end of this year; an inevitable decision after delivering none of the architecture or the political-security framework required to conduct voting. And since that September, Kiir has turbocharged his cyclical appointments and dismissals, keeping his grip on the tiller of the inherently unstable regime. Dozens of appointments have come and gone, often announced late at night on state media —sometimes with no warning to those appointed. Ministers may hold a post for a couple of weeks or months before being unceremoniously shunted out, but are always unable to impact the dire state of education, healthcare, and social services. Still, several influential power brokers of the regime have been summarily defenestrated in the past 18 months, including Akol Kor Kuc, the head of the National Security Service (NCC), and, more explosively, the Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel, the heir apparent to Kiir's throne, last November.

The ageing South Sudanese leader has presided over one of the most extreme forms of state capture. But the oil fields of South Sudan have fallen into disrepair, producing far less today than at their peak, while its income has been stalled by successive closures of the arterial pipeline through Sudan due to the war. Burdened by heavy debt, the government has cut spending and grown more reliant on sporadic financial lifelines from the Emirates, ties that intersect with the wider regional war economy, including support networks linked to Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The logic behind the see-sawing appointments is readily apparent; keeping the vying, fractious ethnic-based coalitions that stake claims to the diminishing petrodollars appeased and at bay, while Kiir plays the delicate political game of cycling through their representatives. The late Hon. Sorobo—and his furious family members—appear to have fallen prey to this inherently chaotic logic.

And yet the dead man's appointment would be perhaps funnier if the scale of suffering were not so acute in South Sudan. Most of the South Sudanese population depends on humanitarian aid, but this, too, is dwindling—budget cuts to aid programs in European powers and the US are taking a heavy toll on the country. Rising conflict and severe flooding are compounding the crisis, pushing agriculture-dependent rural communities toward even greater hardship in 2026, with large parts of the country falling into IPC Levels 4 and 5 of hunger. That is before the fighting that has erupted with the government in much of the Nuer-majority areas of the country, including Central and Eastern Equatoria, Jonglei, Unity State, and Upper Nile in recent weeks. It is the government's repeated military campaigns against its own citizens — often branded as "stabilisation" — that have driven much of the country's adversity.

But the SPLM-IO remains a fractious and weakened coalition, even more diminished than in 2018 when it signed R-ARCSS under intense military pressure. Despite bellicose claims from either side, the government or the opposition forces are unlikely to comprehensively defeat the other in the coming months. More probable is a continued slide into further clashes, greater suffering, and a siloed regime seemingly in an inevitable death spiral. And as the money dries up, force will continue to become increasingly central to the regime's patrimonial logic.

But it is Kiir's most useful fiction that R-ARCSS, much like Hon. Sorobo, remains alive, still wielding it as a diplomatic and political shield to deflect from its policies of war and repression. And it is a fiction that survives only with the quiet acquiescence of the international community in Juba. In Kiir's capital, a deceased man on an electoral body is a particular apt metaphor for a state that survives by pretending life where none remains.

​The Horn Edition Team