South Sudans Injustice System by Rachel Ibreck;

Author:Rachel Ibreck;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Plot 147 is for ‘Andrew’. He was given this token to go and finish the process in Juba block, when he reached there they told him to wait. He has money, 3,500 SSP for the process, and he took the money with him and every day they told him to wait. When he came to us and explained about his case we went there and found that his number was registered by someone else’s name. So he is holding the token only.

The youth leaders said that they had complained about the problems at a public meeting with the quarter council committee, but the discussion grew heated and the meeting was closed down when one of the officials called national security. This was a setback, but they said they remained determined to ‘stand for the voiceless’.

The youth leader’s story was troubling but needed further verification, so they suggested I spoke to a man who had lived in Hai Game since 1965. He confirmed that he too had lost his plot in exactly this fashion and was aware of other similar cases. He had joined the youth activists in a complaint to the mayor as well as writing his own lengthy complaint. From his account, it seemed that a committee had been formed to investigate and a new registration process was proposed. His account tallied with the claims made by the youth leaders and he provided letters and documents to support it. No one seemed certain who was ultimately responsible, but accusations were circulating that a particular member of the quarter council committee might be behind the land grab, or that certain council officials might have benefited. They thought the chief might have either been misled or implicated.

The central concern was that, as one youth leader put it, plots were being ‘distributed to the big people’.28 The landgrabbers seemed to be taking advantage of a political hiatus – the transitional government, promised under the 2015 peace agreement, was still being established and ‘they want to finish the demarcation while government is suspended. They have a lot of hands … who have taken a lot of plots’. The youths said that some members of the community were armed and ready to fight if the problems were not sorted out soon. But they aimed to bring a challenge in court if the committee failed to resolve the matter. Some of the residents had already launched individual court cases.

These last two interviews raised a whole new set of questions about land struggles and activism in Hai Game. They reminded me of an earlier interview I conducted in Juba back in July 2015, when Hai Game’s chief suggested I should meet the chief of nearby Hai Gabat to find out more about landgrabbing in the town. What I learned was that the Hai Gabat quarter council had also applied for the demarcation, and the implementation had begun by the time that I met their chief. But something had gone wrong in the final stages of the

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