Africa Oil & Gas: A new year and a new crisis for South Sudan

Regional outlook
Yet Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has complicated efforts to reach a compromise by offering to crush opposition to Kiir, if the former vice premier refuses to back down. Given the level of military experience on both sides, a military solution seems unlikely and will probably only serve to alienate the Nuer forces. As in other parts of the continent, the experience of very long, complicated civil wars makes renewed fighting even more likely.

All of the ingredients for another civil war are present in South Sudan: poverty; the presence of armed groups that are have grown up with war; plenty of arms; historic, long running disputes between rival groups; and valuable raw materials, in the form of crude oil, that offer the prospect of wealth to whoever takes over.

Alongside continued fighting in Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo, the conflict threatens to reinforce the region’s reputation as the most unstable part of Africa, deterring oil industry investment.

The president of the UN Security Council, Gerard Araud, says that the conflict has the potential to become a “fully fledged war throughout the country”. The UN has an established force of 7,500 soldiers in the country and is currently ramping this up to 12,500 but even this is unlikely to calm this relatively big state. Even if a deal is hammered out, potential oil sector investors will remain concerned that it could erupt again.

Even after the north-south peace process was launched six years ago, there have been numerous clashes between rival ethnic groups who fought together against Khartoum, as well as between troops loyal to Juba and groups who fought against the south as pro-Khartoum proxies.

South Sudan has the third biggest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa and should therefore have the potential to become the continent’s third biggest oil producer. Transforming South Sudan from a culture of war and underdevelopment into a modern, growing African economy was always going to be a testing challenge.

Liberation movements often find this process difficult to manage and South Sudan’s SPLM is no exception but the disintegration of the SPLM would be in nobody’s best interests, at this stage at least.