Time for a New Government!

As some of you may have heard, South Sudan's president saw best to sack his vice-president and all the government ministers on Tuesday.  So effectively the government was dissolved on Tuesday afternoon, which led to some high tensions over the possibile effect that would have on security, and the chance of ethnic clashes arising.  I can happily report that as of today (Friday afternoon) none of that has taken place and life, which was for a few days involved a little more caution and lots of people staying home in case of problems, has now returned to normal.  The one exception being that a new government still hasn't been put in place, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people from going about their normal lives for now.

In South Sudan the government is set up as a one-party system made out of the old rebel group that helped secure the country's independence.  Now formalized as a party (with as far as I can tell no competing parties) they were elected to power and the head of the party made president.  The president then appointed his vice-president and ministers of the 29 or so national ministries.  On Monday he fired them all, while he remains in place he's also decided to reduce the number of ministries to 18 or 11 depending on who you ask. It's unclear what will happen to responsibilities of the ministries that suddenly don't exist anymore.

Anyways, in terms of life here in Juba people were very nervous that it was going to lead to violence.  So much so that when there was fight at the market between two guys (from all accounts a fight of the ordinary variety and not the political kind) a police officer fired his gun into the air to break it up and ended up causing panic.  People heard the gun, assumed the violence had started and ran, the market closed up and people went home and then people in other markets heard that there was violence in one so they closed up and went home.  It wasn't until the next day that is became clear that it was just two guys in a fight, and there hadn't been any actual clashes.  So Thursday was calm, and people were out more and the streets looked normal, today things were running as normal all over town (since I spent the day in a car driving around to various meetings I got a pretty good look around).

As one of the drivers here pointed out to me, the locals are even more scared of violence breaking out then the expats are, because unlike the internationals here most of the locals remember first hand what civil war looks like, and they are terrified to return to it. Short of President Salva Kiir doing something stupid like only appointing Dinka to the new positions, there seem to be high hopes that any sort of violent response will be avoided completely.  We'll have to see what the president does in the coming days, as appointments are expected sometime early next week, but I'm hopeful things will keep rolling right along.  The military has been deployed around Juba to provide extra protection for government buildings, but short of that things seem to be pretty much back to normal after a tense couple of days.

I'm trying to get as much done in the next week as I can. As my boss pointed out I have one week left for meetings and focus groups, then I'll be spending a week traveling to the other countries in Central Equatoria to gather information about their GBV services there, and once I get back I'll have less then two weeks to write up my report before I have to present it.  Times is speeding up, I'm over halfway done with my time here and I still have a lot to get done, so please forgive me if my blogpost are somewhat sparser then usual in my last four weeks here.  All is well, just busy!