Gatwech rejects transitional period extension, calls Kiir “tribal” and unfit to lead

JUBA – South Sudan’s main armed opposition commander, General Simon Gatwech Dual, has denounced the recent decision to extend the country’s transitional period by two years, accusing President Salva Kiir Mayardit of being “tribal” and unfit to lead.

Gatwech was reacting to the announcement by Kiir and his first deputy, Riek Machar, to prolong the transitional period from February 2025 to February 2027, with elections postponed from December 2024 to December 2026.

According to the two leaders, the move is intended to provide more time to implement the 2018 revitalized peace agreement, particularly steps necessary for holding free and fair elections, which are expected to take place two months before the end of the transitional period.

Gatwech, who was the military chief of the SPLA-IO when the peace agreement was signed in September 2018, is not a signatory to the revitalized deal.

He defected in June 2021, accusing Machar of colluding with Kiir to deceive South Sudanese with a peace process that, he said, Kiir was unwilling to implement due to a lack of commitment to the security arrangements.

After his defection, Gatwech formed a breakaway faction of the SPLM/A-IO, known as the Kitgwang group, alongside General Johnson Olony, now a commander in the SSPDF.

In January 2022, he signed a new agreement with Kiir’s government, but that deal failed after Gatwech accused the latter of dishonoring it.

In a statement today on the extension of the transitional period, Gatwech rejected the move, saying, “The extension of the Revitalized Peace Agreement from December 2024 to December 2026 is devastating news for the suffering people of South Sudan and the international community, who hoped for peace to relieve them from insecurity, hunger, and economic collapse.”

Gatwech said the extension by Kiir and Machar was not meant to hold elections but to maintain power.

“Kiir’s declaration of an election date was not to allow democracy but to legitimize his grip on power and dismiss all agreements,” he said, adding that Kiir’s past resistance to peace raises doubts among opposition groups.

He further accused Kiir of dividing the country along ethnic lines, claiming, “President Kiir is tribal, dividing South Sudanese on a sectional basis. He cannot bring peace to the country.”

Gatwech also accused Kiir of dishonoring previous peace agreements, including the one in 2015 that ended with fighting at the presidential palace in Juba almost killing President Kiir and First Vice President Machar.

On the failure to implement security arrangements, Gatwech said, “The creation of a unified army has failed, and forces deserted cantonment camps within months of the agreement being signed.”

He added that elections should only be held when peace and security are in place, which he said are absent in South Sudan.

“Usually, people can go for free and fair elections when there is peace and security. President Kiir has no intension, and his government is on for proxy wars, there is nowhere in South Sudan [where] there is relative peace,” Gatwech said.

Gatwech urged the international community, including the UN, African Union, IGAD, and Troika, to recognize that Kiir and Machar have failed the people of South Sudan and to find a new way forward to save the country from further suffering.

“The mediators and peace-loving nations need to ask how peace could work in South Sudan when there are a lot of political groups and movements that have hold out from the so-call peace agreement. President Kiir had been the obstacle to peace and does not put priority to the people of South Sudan to have peace, and the SPLM/A-IO leadership under Riek Machar sleeps on the wheel,” he said.

“The south Sudanese had been in their POCs since and have lost everything, their children never gone to schools, no security, the government had instigated negative politics into POCs camps, fighting have been taken place inside all the camps in all the towns, Juba, Bor, Malakal and Bentiu etc., when they should suppose be under protection of the UN. United Nations, the AU, Troika, EU and IGAD, need to realize that Kiir and Riek have failed the South Sudanese People and set up another a program to save them from poverty,” he concluded.