On Saturday (February 14th) General Salva Kiir Mayardit, President of the Republic of South Sudan and Commander-In-Chief of the SPLA, issued a decree removing 117 senior officers from active military service and placing them on the reserve list. They included two Lieutenant-Generals, two Major-Generals and over a hundred Brigadier-Generals. Among them were some senior officers serving in the civil administration, including the governors of Unity, Eastern Equatoria, Western Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile states. The move followed the removal last month of some 35 top-level military officers, in what was then the biggest shake-up in the army leadership since South Sudan’s independence in July 2011.
South Sudan’s Minister of Information, Barnaba Marial Benjamin, explained that the President had acted in accordance with public demands to transform the national army into a proper professional body adding that the President was “exercising the powers conferred upon him by the transitional constitution”. The Minister explained the changes were intended basically “to promote growth in the system, giving responsibilities to a fresh group, people with new ideas which need to be tried since we are living in a fast moving and developing world”. He added that there were many other ways retired army generals could now participate in the development of the country: “Some of these generals have administrative background, they have security background, they have business background and they have agriculture background. It will be an opportunity to utilise their knowledge in establishing and managing private security firms in accordance with the parameters of the law, [and] doing so will bring a positive change in the economy of this country.”
The Minister told reporters in Juba that “everybody would be happy to hear that all these retired generals have started producing millions of metric tonnes of food in the next harvesting season which they could not have done while in active service”. He emphasized that the President full trusted that the retired officers would show a good example in accepting the changes, and he planned to give assignments to some of them. Some, he said, had already been reassigned, and those who have requested to go for studies would be encouraged to do so. The Minister said the retired officers should feel proud that they had witnessed the birth of the new nation and the achievement of the objectives for which they fought so hard during the long civil war with the north.
Officials said the changes were part of a much wider government policy designed to transform the security sector and other institutions to provide effective and efficient government. The changes in the army are expected to be the first in a series of reforms which will deal with the armed forces and then move on to other areas including security and the police, public services and finally the government itself.
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* Originally published on A Week in the Horn – February 22, 2013 issue, titled “South Sudan retires over a hundred senior army officers”. Items from A Week in the Horn are re-published here with a permission to do so. You may republish it with attribution and no modification to its contents.
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