The Vice President Trap — A Design to Fail

The Vice President Trap — A Design to Fail

Analysis: The Vice President Trap — A Design to Fail

The South Sudan Federal Democratic Alliance (SSFDA) wishes to address the tragic political absurdity that continues to be paraded as a peace agreement: the appointment of the leader of the opposition as First Vice President under a regime that actively seeks the extermination of his own people.

Let us speak plainly.

This was never a power-sharing deal.
It was never unity.
It was a hostage arrangement in ceremonial clothing.

In any functioning democracy, the office of Vice President implies shared governance, strategic alignment, and mutual legitimacy. In Kiir’s militarized autocracy, however, it is a leash disguised as a handshake — a containment strategy dressed up as compromise. The Vice President is stripped of command, denied a budget, isolated from decision-making, and placed under constant surveillance. His words are censored, his movements monitored, his guards and food controlled by those who plot his political extinction.

This arrangement was always designed to fail.
Even a schoolchild could see that.

You do not build a nation by forcing sworn enemies into the same office while keeping the death squads intact and the genocidal ideology untouched. You cannot ask a man to co-govern with the very regime responsible for killing his kin and burning his villages. And yet, this is precisely what the IGAD Secretariat, the African Union, and the so-called guarantors of peace insisted upon.

They demanded submission, not partnership.
They forced the opposition to kneel at a poisoned table — and called it peace.

Ten Years On: The Results Are Devastating

Today, the truth is no longer debatable:

• Kiir’s “Big Tent” has become the gateway to the NSS Blue House, not to peace.

• The President rules not by law, but by fear.

• The National Security Service (NSS) is no longer an intelligence agency — it is a state terror apparatus.
  Voltage to the scrotum. Fractured limbs. Incommunicado detentions.
  Bodies that vanish into concrete.

• The so-called Vice President?
  A ghost in a borrowed suit — stripped of command, feared by none, now detained and silenced.

• And the grassroots opposition?
  Visited by “Unknown Gunmen.”
  Tortured. Intimidated. Raped. Executed. Erased.

This is not a coalition government.
This is Kiirdom — a paranoid, repressive regime where democracy is nothing more than a decoy and silence is extracted at gunpoint.

Our Stand: Enough

SSFDA affirms that no nation can be built on:

• Genocide,

• Gaslighting,

• And gunpoint governance.

We reject the international community’s ongoing performance of diplomacy — where seating a token opposition leader beside a dictator is labeled “progress.” It is not power-sharing. It is human sacrifice in slow motion.

The only viable future lies in structural transformation — a foundation built not on the bones of the oppressed, but on federalism, equality, and dignity.

We call for:

• A new political order based on true federalism;

• The dismantling of NSS as a tool of domestic terror;

• The restoration of justice, truth, and democratic voice across all 64 Nations of South Sudan.

We will not let silence bury the dead.
We will not let impunity protect the killers.
We will not co-govern with a regime that has targeted our people for extermination.

We say clearly: Enough.
Federal. Free. Fearless. For South Sudan.

Signed,
SSFDA Communications Office
Contact for interviews (via secure channels): pressoffice@ssfda.org