Reflections on South Sudan: One Year After Independence

On July 9, 2012 South Sudan, the world's newest country, celebrated its first birthday. This past March I traveled to Juba, South Sudan and on the occasion of the first anniversary of the country's independence, Ben encouraged me to write about my experience and my thoughts on the country as it stands today.


The Deep End of the Pool

After nearly 24 hours'  travel, I stepped down the stairs and onto the tarmac at Juba Airport. It is March but the midday temp was already surpassing 90 degrees and the natural musk of  airplane food and recycled air was compounded by sweat. I followed the crowd into a sparse room split in two by a wooden counter. To my left was the immigration control window, which looked shabbier than the bullet-proof check-out counters that are becoming harder to find in the bodegas of Northwest DC. There was a vague system of lines, but mostly a mass of people, some wearing UN badges, some wearing suits; mostly, it was a seething mob hot and crowded into a third of a larger room after being trapped hot and crowded in the plane from Addis Ababa to Juba. This was my introduction to Africa. I'd never been to the continent before, but suffice to say I was starting in the deep end of the pool.

After arguing, some shoving, and handing over the USD 100 entrance fee--cash only from bills printed after 2006, as I learned from the discourteous immigration officer--I went to customs and had my bags searched and then okay-ed by writing "OK" in the bag with white chalk. None of the customs "officers" wore uniforms and it was difficult to see or perceive the official state. 


On the way to the hotel I experienced about 50% of the paved roads that exist in Africa's newest capital city. My hotel, the Nile Beach Resort, was behind the soccer stadium, down about a half mile of dirt roads. Later, I learned that my hotel was probably the fourth best hotel in Juba. You see, my room had running water (though not hot water), an A/C, a TV that got two channels (one channel would change based on the whims of the individual working in the registration hut), and if I stood close to the registration hut I could get a wifi signal. Belying its name, the resort has no beach whatsoever.

This was March 2012, two month after the government of South Sudan had refused to pay the extortionist rates Sudan wanted to charge to transit the South's oil through Sudan's pipelines to the coast. The South Sudanese decided the best bet was to just shut the oil off. But this was just before the violence in Heglig along the border. I was in Juba for a conference, an opportunity for the South Sudanese government to talk about all the investment opportunities in the country. And there were many. The country needs paved roads, clean water, agriculture, industry; you name it, Africa's newest state needs it.

The Afterglow of Independence

At the conference, there was a former Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) soldier who'd started a construction business based almost entirely on hard labor. His workers had literally dug the ditches and helped plain many of the dirt roads around the city. He joined the SPLA when he was 12 years old and now I figured him to be in his late 20s. Here was a man whose life knew more of war than of peace. Yet, to speak to him, you couldn't help but be excited. On the first day of the conference he came wearing the South Sudan flag like a cape and a beaming smile; this was a man who had fought for the freedom and independence of this country and the excitement of that victory still shown upon his face. When he took the stage he spoke in broken, nearly unintelligible English, but the pride, the care, the sheer commitment he had to his country was evident immediately. He encouraged many of the assembled potential investors to believe in South Sudan. He thanked the international community for its support. Juba is one place in the developing world where being a Westerner isn't a liability and the gentleman's energy was infectious. As he left the stage, all those assembled clapped and cheered. After a dizzying arrival, this man appealed to the optimist in me that South Sudan was a country full of opportunity, freed from the burden of state neglect, her freedom fighters were now rulers, and if they were anything like this man surely the country had a positive future, with or without the oil on.

Another speaker in the conference was a South African who had been sent by SAB Miller to open the South Sudan Brewery. Literally the first factory in South Sudan was a brewery (and having enjoyed a not insignificant quantity of their product while in Juba, I would say it beats PBR). The brewery gave way to general bottling of soda and filtered bottled water.  This brewery, the first industry, which on the surface strikes as a specious use of priorities was turning a healthy profit, but as just importantly it was providing an incredibly large quantity of free filtered water at various water stations around the city. I felt like I was hearing from the brewery a lecture on what corporate social responsibility is supposed to be: make a product, make money on that product, but use the byproduct of that profit to help a community that desperately needs it. The head of the brewery was a jovial man, excited to be in Juba (I would come to find this was a rather uncommon sentiment), excited about the work he did, and the ability of his company to give back. Again the optimism swelled within me. This was an investment that had paid off and was paying dividends to the community. But this was not my final impression of South Sudan and its prospects.

Unfortunately Out of the Country

If the conference began on a hopeful tone, it did not end so.  The agenda called for an impressive list of government ministers from all conceivable departments of the South Sudanese government. The goal was to put decision-makers in the room with investors, but time and time again we heard that "Minister so-and-so is unfortunately out of the country." For a young nation, it seemed curious that so many of it's high government officials would be out of the country. What became clear was "out of the country" more precisely implied "in Nairobi at his villa."


It became an open joke that many of the decision-makers, former generals in the SPLA, many whom had long toiled at war and had deep connections with Western diplomats, had gained independence for their country, fleeced what they could from the international development community and retreated to the modernity and solemnity of Nairobi rather than confront the stark poverty of their own country.  Imagine if the founding fathers of the United States, fatigued by war, prideful of their victory, had then largely retreated to estates in France, our ally and benefactor rather than stay to govern the country. Where would we be as a nation? South Sudan finds itself nearly bankrupt, playing games of brinkmanship with Sudan over oil and land, as a populace enjoys new found independence without progress. The fleecing of international aid is so pervasive that President Salva Kiir has actually demanded government officials return what is calculated to be $4 billion dollars in pilfered funds to help keep the country afloat as oil negotiations drag on between South Sudan and its erstwhile former masters in Khartoum.


Ground Truth
"Oh, the country will be bankrupt by September," said a friend of mine who'd spent the past year in Juba. In 2011, revenue from oil accounted for 98.1% of all government revenue collected by Juba. And the spigot has been off since January. But it gets worse than that. My friend continued, "And even if they turn the oil on, right now, today, it'll be six months before they receive payment." This was back in March and the oil is still off and doesn't look to be turned on anytime soon. The story I heard from my friend and many of his colleagues was one I saw played out at the conference.  The leaders in government had won the war and seemed quite disinterested in doing much more than that. Juba is the epicenter of more NGOs and aid groups than any other place in the world right now. The UN presence is huge, as is the U.S. presence.  The aid workers live in compounds, gilded prisons, with more stringent obvious security than I saw to get into the White House. I never felt unsafe in Juba. Ever. But no U.S. government employee could travel in Juba at night except by armored car. Those shiny, white Toyota Land Cruiser arrived in convoys after meals outside the compound like a mobster's taxi service.


I had a hard time reconciling the pessimism felt by the aid workers I talked with to the optimism felt by the man wearing the South Sudanese flag. I couldn't wrap my head around the notion that government leaders would leave so quickly after achieving independence, while this South African man opened a brewery and maintained a thriving business. There was opportunity here, good will, and people ready to do something for their new country, but the leaders were asleep at the wheel.


A Dangerous Game
Alan Boswell does a great job breaking down the massive lobbying effort by NGOs, celebrities, congressmen, and others that led to the sustained effort to have an indepedent South Sudan.  The effort was bi-partisan; it connected liberals with evangelicals; it was supported by the UN; and the final transition to independence was peaceful.  South Sudan's independence was not easy but its oil wealth (even if it can't get it out) and the support of the international community give it substantial advantages not enjoyed by other nascent states. But with so much support comes corruption. And, as patrons of South Sudan high-fived each other, the SPLA commanders picked the pocket of their own nation to enrich themselves.


It was like the objective of independence blinded the international community to the corruption. So what happens now?  Don't believe the hype about an oil pipeline to Mombasa, that's a dream and the initially suggested timeline of 18 months is laughable to anyone who knows anything about the extractive industry--worse, it still hasn't gotten started. For now, it looks like Juba will go bankrupt, but maybe so does Khartoum. Right now, I think the South Sudanese government is playing a dangerous game with Sudan and with the international community.  I think President Kiir and the country's leaders feel like they've been propped up and pushed along by the international community for this long.  Why would that change, especially with Khartoum falling off more people's Christmas card list every day? But that's a big if and in the end those government leaders can retreat Nairobi. It's the populace, long neglected by Khartoum, that will now suffer the brinkmanship its leaders have engaged in.


When I had arrived at Juba airport, I had missed it.  My friend told me about the old Russion MiG jet, crashed off to the side of the runway, now obscured by the long grass that had begun to overtake it. When I walked back out onto the tarmac to board the plane home I made a point to look.  And there it was rusting in the sun, a souvenir left behind by Khartoum, inoperable, in shambles. No one has bothered to move it, the battle over, the debris remains unattended.

Trolling CNN Continued

Via The Dish

Jokes aside, congratulations to Anderson Cooper for coming around to the notion that the ambiguity of his sexuality was doing more harm than good. Ones sexual orientation shouldn't matter--it shouldn't be an issue--but so long as it is, this Editor hopes prominent gay men and women will continue to serve as role models.

Trolling CNN

I mean, why not?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Targeting the Voice of a Government

For purposes of the following discussion, please assume that there is a non-international armed conflict ongoing in Syria. Thus, international humanitarian law is operative.

Today, Syrian rebels attacked a pro-Assad TVstation, killing seven people including journalists and security guards. The pro-Assad TV station attacked, Ikhbariya, is apparently not a state-owned enterprise. Instead it is a privately owned media with a pro-government view point. Although not necessarily relevant, the ownership status of the station may be an important indicator of whether the station itself was a legitimate target.

The question of whether the station itself was a legitimate target is answered by whether it was a military objective. To be a military objective, an object must by its “nature, purpose, or use make an effective contribution to military action” and the destruction of that object “must offer a definite military advantage” at the time of the attack (See, e.g., Additional Protocol I). Those objects not meeting this definition—civilian objects—are not legitimate targets. Clear military objectives are things like anti-aircraft batteries, general headquarters, or tanks. Objectives that may or may not make “an effective contribution to military action” at a given moment include things like power stations that service civilian electrical grids or trains.

Television and radio stations sometimes fall into the category of objects that, although generally civilian in nature, also serve a military purpose, making them at times legitimate targets of attack. For example, during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, NATO targeted a Serbian Radio and TV transmitter, killing several civilians, because it was integral to Serbian Command, Control, and Communications networks. The Office of the Prosecutor for the ICTY released a report on that and several other NATO attacks accused by Serbia of violating international humanitarian law. Said the Office of the Prosecutor:

[T]he attack appears to have been justified by NATO as part of a more general attack aimed at disrupting the FRY Command, Control and Communications network, the nerve centre and apparatus that keeps Milosevic in power, and also as an attempt to dismantle the FRY propaganda machinery. Insofar as the attack actually was aimed at disrupting the communications network, it was legally acceptable.

If, however, the attack was made because equal time was not provided for Western news broadcasts, that is, because the station was part of the propaganda machinery, the legal basis was more debatable. Disrupting government propaganda may help to undermine the morale of the population and the armed forces, but justifying an attack on a civilian facility on such grounds alone may not meet the "effective contribution to military action" and "definite military advantage" criteria required by the Additional Protocols .... The ICRC Commentary on the Additional Protocols interprets the expression "definite military advantage anticipated" to exclude "an attack which only offers potential or indeterminate advantages" and interprets the expression "concrete and direct" as intended to show that the advantage concerned should be substantial and relatively close rather than hardly perceptible and likely to appear only in the long term (ICRC Commentary on the Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977, para. 2209). While stopping such propaganda may serve to demoralize the Yugoslav population and undermine the government’s political support, it is unlikely that either of these purposes would offer the "concrete and direct" military advantage necessary to make them a legitimate military objective.

Notice that the Office of the Prosecutor took pains to discount the notion that a broadcast facility used strictly for the transmission of propaganda (or news) is a legitimate target, whatever impact it may have on the morale of opposition forces. However, the report also indicated that the use of a transmission facility, as in Rwanda, to incite violence may render that transmission facility a legitimate target.

The private nature of the Syrian television station attacked today means it is unlikely to comprise an element of Syrian C3 today. This is not to say it could not be used for C3 purposes in an ad hoc manner in the future if, say, regular Syrian C3 were degraded by a bombing campaign. However, the military objective test demands we examine the circumstance as they exist not as they could exist.

If that station does not form part of Syrian C3 then it is likely not a military objective. That said, if the station was being used by irregular pro-Assad forces to incite violence at the moment it was attacked, then it may have been a legitimate target. This reasoning seems to have guided the NATO bombing of a Libyan satellite transmitter last year but it is not without its detractors.

And what of the journalists? The journalists killed in today’s attack were almost certainly innocent civilians—as opposed to civilians directly participating in hostilities. Although IHL’s prohibition on attacking innocent civilians is strict, when civilians are killed as an incident to an attack on a military objective their killing does not violate IHL so long as their deaths were not in excess of the military advantage to be gained by destroying the military objective. Obviously, if the TV station was not a military objective in the first place then the killing of these journalists would in fact qualify as a war crime. 

Laws Should Address Problems & the Supreme's Shangri-La

The Bloomberg editorial board takes the Supreme Court to the woodshed over over the spurious Montana campaign law decision from earlier this week. And I couldn't agree more.  It's not secret I'm no fan of the Citizens United decision for a few reasons.  First, equating money with speech is ludicrous because one is inherently apportioned equitably across the populace, money is not.  Second, because more money in politics is almost certainly a recipe for corruption.  I mean, we didn't seen a subversive MP3 in Rep. William Jefferson's freezer or a library of banned literature in Ted Stevens' renovated home.

More to the point in the Montana case, the state has experienced that too much money leads to corruption:

Montana begged to differ. Based on its history, which included the wholesale purchase of the state’s Legislature and political class by mine owners more than a century ago, Montana restricted corporate spending in elections. It did so not because the state abhors free speech, but because it required a bulwark against corporate corruption that had subverted the state’s laws and threatened the well-being of its citizens.

But the Supreme Court didn't much care for this rationale. Money equaled speech after Citizens United, but as the Bloomberg editorial continues:

In Citizens United, the majority... compounded this error by patting itself on the back for at last bringing clarity and coherence to the nation’s muddled campaign finance regime. “A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before today,” Justice Kennedy crowed. This is a pitiful statement. No such system existed when Kennedy wrote it. And the prospect of ensuring effective disclosure has only grown more dubious since... Republican leaders - - including House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, both of whom vowed support for campaign finance disclosure in recent years -- are blocking it. Thus Kennedy has not only been wrong about disclosure in the past and present, he may continue to be so well into the future.Such errors are not incidental to Citizens United. They are central to it. If political money corrupts, then there are countervailing interests to weigh against the potent claims of free speech. If powerful interests -- including foreign interests -- are free not only to influence elections, but also to do so secretly, then the Shangri-La of free speech conjured by Citizens United, in which the myriad sources of finance are fully disclosed, exists purely in the imaginations of five men in black robes.

Quite right.  Of course there are those that will argue that the legislation passed by Montana was in response to an event over a century ago and that we can't legislate against a problem that doesn't exist anymore, especially if it violates what some consider "free speech." 

Though many of those same folks, who support the Citizens United decision and the free speech they feel it defends aren't up in arms about legislation that would restrict a citizen's ability to vote to solve a voter fraud problem that doesn't exist.

Medicaid Does Make People Healthier

Planet Money, a special program on NPR, had an episode last week exploring the research recently released by Katherine Baicker, a health economist at Harvard.  Her research has begun to lay to rest at least one argument against expanding Medicaid, but it's also called into question an oft cited rationale people use when they are to expand Medicaid.  You can listen to the whole thing here (which also goes into the methodology of the research), but here are some of the key takeaways:

• Across a similar socio-economic level, people on Medicaid reported better health than people not on Medicaid (reliant on faith-based, charitable, emergency room, i.e. non-government based healthcare).
• Respondents on Medicaid were 40% less likely to go into debt collection.  Basically, we see positive spillover benefits from Medicaid coverage.  People don't rack up a lot of medical debt, so they have less debt overall so they are much more likely to be able to service the debt they have and not slip into collection.
• Respondents indicated feeling more healthy within a month of being on Medicaid, even though it took many of them much longer to really engage with the system.  Basically, without the threat of catastrophic health costs hanging over their heads people instantly felt better, less stressed.

All of these are positive things.  But there are a couple caveats to note.  First, this is based on survey results, credit reports, and various other non-biological data (though the study does include some health records).  The researchers have actually taken blood samples from many of the people surveyed and when those results get released you could have definitive medical evidence of improved healthcare outcomes for people on Medicaid.  The second caveat is perhaps a bigger issue:

• The group on Medicaid actually spent 25% more on procedures than the group not on Medicaid during the first year of the program.

One of the biggest economic rationales for expanding Medicaid is that it will pay for itself.  As people have access to preventive care the overall cost would come down and the expansion would pay for itself.  In the first year of research this didn't prove to be true.  

I would speculate (and I acknowledge it's speculation) that you might be see a binge effect.  People have gone from famine to feast and as they see primary care doctors, those doctors find problems that may have been ignored for a long time.  And the research indicates that most of procedures undergone by Medicaid recipients were scheduled, which would support my speculation.  The researchers are still tracking this group and will report out year two results soon.  I wouldn't be surprised to find that in year two the costs of the Medicaid group drop substantially as people level off into a steady, healthy state.

For now, Baicker says rather eloquently, we have two definitive pieces of information.  One, people on Medicaid have better health outcomes.  Two, having people on Medicaid is more expensive (so far).  So policy makers have to make the cost-benefit analysis for themselves.  What's the value of a healthier populace?  Does it exceed the cost?  I think you all know where I come down on this, but I'm sure there are those that would disagree.