In the opinion page of Arab News, dated Dec. 21, 2025, columnist Hafed Al-Ghwell wrote an article on South Sudan with a tabloid-style title, “South Sudan’s ruling elites rely on instability for survival.”
As Arab News is a widely respected newspaper whose golden jubilee was celebrated in April this year, and to which I was honored to have been invited, it is incumbent upon me to exercise the right of reply, in the interest of balanced discourse, to some facile claims that have been made in the article.
The author argues that “since independence in 2011, the promise of elections, a permanent constitution, and a unified state has been endlessly deferred. These delays are often framed as technical problems or security concerns. In reality, they form a governing method. Instability is not a failure of elite rule in South Sudan; it is the operating system.”
Well, this statement is a gross oversimplification. The reality is that South Sudan is grappling with complex challenges of transition from conflict to peace and democracy. These challenges may have taken so long to address but they are not insurmountable. Ironically, some of them are rooted in the very mechanism that was supposed to resolve them — the peace agreement.
When the country drifted into a conflict in 2013 following a botched internal debate around issues of governance and constitution, the region and the international community intervened to broker a peace deal in 2015 that became known as the Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, or ARCSS. Despite all the goodwill intoned in the agreement, two chapters on governance and security arrangements respectively remained problematic. They were seen from the onset to have been loaded with potential powder kegs. Eventually, the agreement imploded in 2016, prompting the peacemakers to reboot it all over again in the form of the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, or R-ARCSS, of 2018.
Again, R-ARCSS did not entirely resolve the flashpoints entailed in Chapters One and Two. For instance, the notion of a collegial presidency in Chapter 1.9.1 was crafted in an abstruse language that left some junior partners in the coalition to assume concurrent powers as the president of the republic. The same notion prevailed in the security arrangements where chiefs of staff of various opposition armies sought to maintain independent commands. In short, chapter one and two of R-ARCSS have had inadvertent debilitating effects.
It is said that the devil is in the details, but in the case of  R-ARCSS, the details became the devil that bedeviled the implementation of the agreement.
Notwithstanding those complexities, significant progress was made. Even the author admits that key provisions of the agreement have been “half-implemented.” It is actually more than half.
Now, a major shift away from the familiar delays is about to take place. This is in response to what is being dubbed as “extensions fatigue,” a reference to the extensions of the period of the current transitional government. The people of South Sudan want to go for elections and so do the parties to the R-ARCSS. In this spirit, these parties agreed earlier this week to amend the agreement, in accordance with Article 8.4. This will allow them to defer some key tasks such as constitution-making process, census and housing data, which could be conducted by the post-elections’ government.
The amendments will also allow the parties to use the 2011 Transitional Constitution as amended. The proposed amendments will be passed by the Cabinet, the Revitalized Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission, or R-JMEC, and ratified by the parliament. Meanwhile, the National Elections Commission released this week the 102 geographical constituencies for 2026 elections, using the 2008 population census. A total of 35 percent of additional seats will be allocated for women. Phase Two of Unified Forces will be graduated within the next few months. Before elections, the army will have been unified under one command.
As it can be seen, this is a huge undertaking. The promise of elections is all set to take place. It was delayed due to some genuinely complex issues and not because there is some uncanny wisdom to profit from instability, as sensationalized by the author. Moreover, issues of constitutionalism and institutionalism are complex matters that take decades to settle. This is perhaps why even the author’s own country of birth, whose independence long preceded that of South Sudan by more than 60 years, is still grappling with them to this day.
Rather than prophesying doom and gloom for the upcoming electoral process in South Sudan, the author could actually help through the organizations to which he is affiliated to ensure that the process is inclusive and credible.
Neither South Sudan nor its ruling elite need to invest in instability as a governing system. There are far greater returns and dividends in peace and stability. The World Bank’s South Sudan Natural Resources Review (2025) described the country as “rich in natural resources, oil, fisheries, forestry and wildlife, alongside significant agricultural land, massive livestock (over 60 million) and mineral resources like gold.” The report correctly cited instability as the main factor preventing the exploitation of these resources for sustainable economic development.
With such vast resources, there is a pervasive sense of awareness and urgency among the South Sudanese that stability is the key to unlocking their economic potential. To assume that some elites in that country would have chosen instability over stability is to fictionalize a bizarre scene in some exotic place in Joseph Conrad’s novel, “Heart of Darkness.”
Those of us who are fortunate to witness from this vantage point the massive economic diversification drive of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of its Vision 2030, could clearly see how South Sudan could carve a niche as an important trade partner in the area of food security. It is this opportunity that prompted us to be among the first countries to confirm our participation in the Riyadh Expo 2030. And we are bracing to participate at the premier Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh in January 2026.
Away from doom and gloom, there is good news; some entrepreneurs who know what South Sudan has to offer are not waiting for full stability to return. Just over a couple of weeks ago a young Saudi entrepreneur showed up at the embassy looking for a visa. We asked him whether he was not discouraged by South Sudan’s investment naysayers. The young man said he was unfazed and that he had already established his business in South Sudan along with another fellow Saudi national.

Mayom Alier
Ambassador of South Sudan to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Riyadh