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Sudan Tribune

Plural news and views on Sudan

Sudan has commission to give southerners govt jobs

August 7, 2007 (JUBA, Sudan) — Sudan has formed a long-delayed commission to ensure southerners get at least 20 percent of civil service jobs as promised under a north-south peace deal, a southern official said on Tuesday.

Awut Deng, south Sudan’s public service minister, said few southerners had found jobs in the central government bureaucracy since the January 2005 peace deal which ended Africa’s longest civil war.

There has been no real change in the structure of the civil service, said Deng. “The national civil service has not been set up as seen by the CPA,” she added.

The north-south deal, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), created a semi-autonomous southern government and a coalition government in Khartoum, and gave southerners the right to vote on secession by 2011.

Deng said the commission, created last month, meant there was now a mechanism in place to give 20-30 percent of civil service jobs to southerners who, like many in Sudan, say they are marginalised by the northern-dominated government.

It is still unclear what positions will go to southerners, she said.

“I think there is a lack of real political will. Our partner has been very selective in what is supposed to be implemented. They’re leaving key elements of the CPA,” said Deng.

The International Crisis Group think tank criticised the northern National Congress Party in a recent report, saying it was deliberately not implementing key parts of the deal and warning that this could reignite the north-south conflict.

Deng’s ministry in southern Sudan is also planning to investigate the inflated number of southern civil servants on the payroll who may not exist, a problem to some extent inherited from the former northern rule over southern towns.

“There are a lot of ghost names, particularly in the states,” said Deng. “We are not sure if the figures we are getting are real people working in the civil service … We’re now asking all the ministries to give us their payrolls.”

South Sudan’s Vice President Riek Machar has said that up to 70 percent of the southern government’s budget goes on salaries, including the massive army.

The southern government is under financial pressure because oil revenues — its single source of real income — have been falling, said Deng.

Under the peace deal the southern government gets around 50 percent of oil revenues from fields in the south, which should total around $1.3 billion a year.

(Reuters)

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