Derrick Hudson: South Sudan more than a story about war

Der­rick Hud­son is a pro­fes­sor at the Col­orado School of Mines in Gold­en, Colorado

“I am essen­tial­ly explor­ing, at the moment, how South Sudan and the Repub­lic of Sudan are going to divide the debt that they accu­mu­lat­ed when they were one enti­ty.” Hud­son said.

The coun­try would have qual­i­fied for debt relief under the Heav­i­ly Indebt­ed Poor Coun­tries Ini­tia­tive (HIPC) and have a sub­stan­tial por­tion of its debt for­giv­en, but cur­rent­ly does not qual­i­ty because of its huge oil wealth.

Estab­lished as a joint ini­tia­tive of the World Bank and the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) in 1996, HIPC works at “ensur­ing that no poor coun­try faces a debt bur­den it can­not manage.”

South Sudan is fac­ing a huge debt chal­lenge it can­not man­age, but sits on huge oil reserves. “Sudan is a para­dox in many ways, because of its oil wealth. It does not tech­ni­cal­ly qual­i­fy for debt relief, so it would have to go through anoth­er process in order to qual­i­ty. That could be a com­plex process.”

To explain how tough this is for the young nation, he uses the anal­o­gy of a “bad mar­riage,” and a “thorny sit­u­a­tion” to describe what both coun­tries would need to do to divide the debt, and whether the North would agree to the terms of any arrange­ments or not. “The two may not agree on who gets what debt.” he said.

Anoth­er huge chal­lenge for South Sudan is whether Abyei, the cen­tral part of South Sudan, will decide to go with the north or stay with the South at a yet to be deter­mined ref­er­en­dum. Why this is brew­ing up to be a bat­tle front is because, “the land there is sit­ting on top of a good por­tion of the country’s known oil reserves,” Hud­son stated.

It’s a del­i­cate sit­u­a­tion that needs to be han­dled with care by the inter­na­tion­al community.

“Most of Abyei is geo­graph­i­cal­ly in the North, how­ev­er, the peo­ple who live on that land are cul­tur­al­ly iden­ti­fied with the south.”

While the South holds the oils wells, the refiner­ies are most­ly locat­ed in the North, a dis­tinc­tion which Hud­son said must be clear­ly understood.

At anoth­er lev­el, Hud­son likens the Abyei dilem­ma to a pris­on­er com­ing out of a long jail sen­tence. “The data on coun­tries like South Sudan who have gone through pro­tract­ed con­flict, it’s sort of like if you have been in prison and you come out, the recidi­vism rate is very high,” he said.

His­to­ry of Civ­il War Shrouds Knowl­edge of Sudan 

Aside from debt man­age­ment, South Sudan needs to devel­op its infra­struc­ture such as the Juba air­port, strength­en its demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions, and build the coun­try. Hud­son rec­om­mends a com­pet­i­tive, free mar­ket style way to busi­ness for South Sudan as a means to build con­fi­dence and improve cus­tomer ser­vice for trav­el­ers to the coun­try. The argu­ment for a quick solu­tion to devel­op­ment in South Sudan is not sim­ple, he argued. The coun­try is not immune to the oil dynamic.

“If you’ve got all this oil wealth, then it is much more of a ten­den­cy for coun­tries like Chi­na, which is a major force there, to come in; they fun­nel the prof­its of gov­ern­ments, if the gov­ern­ment is not trans­par­ent, if the insti­tu­tions are weak, then a lot of the mon­ey will end up favor­ing one group over another.”

While most of the work in South Sudan is in the gov­ern­ment, most busi­ness­es in the coun­try are run by for­eign­ers such as Indi­ans and Eritre­ans, who own the hotels where Hud­son stayed while in the country.

“You can see that the South Sudanese, the Nuer’s, the Dinka’s, have a while to go before they become part of the eco­nom­ic engine and growth.”

For the coun­try to real­ly devel­op, he cau­tions the South Sudan gov­ern­ment to be inten­tion­al in its actions.

“But because they do have oil wealth, if the gov­ern­ment can become more like Botswana and real­ly think through how to be more trans­par­ent, and attract more for­eign direct invest­ment and to real­ly think about how to diver­si­fy their exports.”

Hud­son would like to see things first hand, he said, which is why he trav­eled to South Sudan in order to see the sit­u­a­tion and per­haps get involved directly.

“In Juba, for a cou­ple of days while I was there, I did see com­pa­nies com­ing in. Every time I look up, I saw things being built. The Amer­i­can com­pa­ny, Cater­pil­lar, is every­where in Juba with all their equipment.”

The Aus­tralians, the Brits and Chi­nese are also there. How­ev­er, the Chi­nese tend to keep to them­selves, even while they have their fin­gers on all the major devel­op­ment projects tak­ing place in the South, accord­ing to Hud­son. He is crit­i­cal of this and thinks “I am not sure if I can go total­ly along with that. Africans are tired of that dance,” because the Chi­nese do not ask any ques­tions about human rights, the free mar­kets and demo­c­ra­t­ic prac­tices tak­ing place in South Sudan.

“All they sim­ply say is just busi­ness,” a god-father anal­o­gy he references.

“If the Chi­nese are doing all the work, the peo­ple are not devel­op­ing them­selves, that’s the essen­tial point I am making.”

Speak­ing about what makes South Sudan dif­fer­ent from oth­er coun­tries, he said the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the coun­try by most peo­ple is most­ly a stereo­type that exists about it, stem­ming from lack of knowl­edge about its diversity.

Hud­son describes the usu­al tra­jec­to­ry of the North-South divide and clas­si­fi­ca­tions of Sudanese along Mus­lim-Chris­t­ian-Arab lines and talk of ear­ly Chris­t­ian influ­ence, Black-Arab Mus­lims as a “car­i­ca­ture” of the country.

“As I’ve learned more about it, I’ve had to pause, because I can’t make these broad, sweep­ing com­ments about the South and the North.”