Raymond Mujuni
The Uganda Peoples Defence Forces have now spent a month on South Sudanese soil. Following a breakdown of relations between the president Salva Kiir and the first vice president Riek Machar that rapidly escalated into confrontations, Uganda’s army stepped in – for the second time in S. Sudan’s short 14 years as an independent state – to provide stability, deter a rebel advance onto the capital and secure vital national installations.
It is no mean feat for the UPDF. It comes at tremendous cost in human, material and logistical resources and requires careful political considerations for Uganda with her Northern neighbor and countries around the world. It also stretches an army with troop deployments in Somalia, Central African Republic, DRC, and Equatorial Guinea.
Foreign deployment is further fraught with a new and emerging global confederation that foreign troops face massive limitations in state building; the failure of the U.S. in Afghanistan, France in Niger, or even South Africa in DRC brought doubt to whether foreign troops can contribute meaningfully to state building.
Yet, no one discounts that armies – strong and effective ones, are the most potent tool in state building. The natural question to ask then is; why does the UPDF deploy to South Sudan? There might be many official reasons but from an international relations standpoint, States are rational actors. They rely upon existing information to map out their strategic and tactical calculations on the kind of future they wish to live in and around.
Donald Trump’s slapping of tariffs on more than half of the world is a perfect example of a state using its economic power to try and shape the realities it wishes to live in – whether they succeed or not is another matter.
Uganda shares her two longest borderlines with complex and complicated states; The DRC, for which Uganda shares some 765km of borderline has been at internecine civil war for more than three decades and South Sudan, with 682kms has now been at war intermittently for 12 of its 14 years. Each of these two countries have sent more than a million refugees into Uganda and threatened the externalization of their conflicts onto Ugandan soil.
In the years before South Sudan’s independence, parts of it’s geography had been under the control of Sudan’s Omar-El-Bashir who was a hostile actor to the Ugandan state. Uganda wishes to live in peaceful co-existence with her neighbors and, to that end, a lot of diplomatic resources are expended.
For South Sudan, Uganda has been a key guarantor of the comprehensive peace agreement, it has provided base for South Sudan elite to train and prepare to take on state duties, it has underwritten businesses of Ugandans in South Sudan to keep the economy afloat, and has now twice in under a decade deployed troops to protect vital installations, deter rebel advance to overthrow a legitimate government and used diplomacy through the head of state to strike a balance between political competition and state building.
These reasons make a coherent case for UPDF presence in South Sudan. Not forgetting, the most important, that the South Sudan government has invited the UPDF onto her territory and continues to fight side by side. As a rational actor in the conduct of her foreign policy, Uganda’s longest strategic calculation – which is in the interest of her neighbors – is a peaceful co-existence that leads to economic and even political intergration.
