July 3, 2024 (JUBA) – The principals that are signatory to the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), are expected on Wednesday to decide on the fate of elections slated for December this year.

Previously, in accordance with the peace deal, the country´s first ever elections as an independent state since 2011, was meant to take place by the end of 2022.

However, the 2022 deadline passed due to lack of implementation of many key provisions that should have proceeded the conduct of the elections. This forced the peace parties to postpone the elections and extended the duration of the agreement by 24 months through an agreed Roadmap from February 2022.

The Roadmap rescheduled the elections to take place by December 2024.

Again, many key provisions such as the unification of forces, the permanent constitution-making process, the conduct of population census to determine number of electoral constituencies, the repatriation of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), among others, are yet to be completed.

The parties, thus formed a joint High-Level Committee to again review the status of the implementation of the agreement and to write an explanatory note to the main principals signatory to the agreement in order to decide what comes next.

The committee has been working on the document for the last two months until this week when they announced the completion of their work.

A member of the committee, also South Sudan’s Minister of Petroleum, Puot Kang Chol, said revised document will be submitted to the principals on Wednesday.

“At the meeting of the High-Level Committee on the implementation of the agreement, we completed the revision of the review of the status of the implementation of the Roadmap, agreed upon by the parties in 2022. We have again looked at the way forward as Parties to the agreement, and what should be done next. We will finalize that tomorrow (Tuesday) and immediately take the review to the principals where the final decision will come from,” he said on Monday.

Chol, a leading member of the Sudan People´s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM-IO), noted that during the review, the committee identified provisions of the peace agreement that have been implemented, and those that are partially implemented plus those that have not been implemented at all.

Many peace parties, including the armed opposition faction led by First Vice President Riek Machar have been calling for postponement of the scheduled December 2024 elections, citing the need to first implement the provisions in the agreement which serve as prerequisites for the conduct of the elections.

(ST)