Independence Was the Easy Part: Salva Kiir and South Sudan's Troubled Years

On the morning of July 9, 2011, Juba was a city transformed. Car horns blared, dancers sent dust into the air, and at the center of the celebration stood Salva Kiir in his familiar wide-brimmed cowboy hat, receiving the congratulations of a world that believed it was watching a success story begin. South Sudan had voted overwhelmingly to separate from Sudan, becoming the first new country in Africa in nearly two decades. The long struggle was over. The future had arrived.
It is difficult to look at that footage now. The same man, the same hat, presides over a very different country: one at peace on paper and at war underneath, where millions were displaced during the worst of the fighting, where civil servants can go months without pay, and where billions of dollars in international aid have produced little lasting stability. How does a liberation hero become, for many, a symbol of the dream's collapse? The answer begins with who Salva Kiir actually is—and what independence made of him.
The soldier who never wanted the top job
Kiir was born into a Dinka cattle-herding family in Bahr el Ghazal, in what was then southern Sudan. He was not shaped by the great universities of Khartoum or London. He was shaped by war. In the late 1960s, as a young man, he joined the Anyanya rebellion, fighting the first civil war against the Sudanese state. When that war ended in compromise in 1972, he stayed in the army and rose slowly, known less for speeches than for endurance.
The second war, which began in 1983, was the war of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army—and above all, it was John Garang's war. Garang was the visionary, the intellectual who framed the south's struggle as part of a larger transformation of all of Sudan. Kiir, his deputy, was the field commander, the man who held together a broad and fractious military alliance through two decades in the bush. By the time the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in January 2005, Kiir's role was clear and comfortable: the loyal soldier beside a great leader.
That arrangement lasted three weeks. In July 2005, Garang died in a helicopter crash, just as the peace process he had built was beginning. Kiir inherited the movement, the position, and the promise of a future referendum. Not because he had sought the job, but because he was the one standing next in line.
Independence was the easy part
There is a version of Salva Kiir that the outside world rarely saw: the patient, slightly awkward conciliator. In the years after Garang's death, he held a fragile alliance of commanders and ethnic leaders together long enough to deliver the referendum that southerners had been promised. In January 2011, after a peaceful vote, South Sudan formally declared its independence. For a man who had spent his life in uniform, it was a stunning achievement.
But the transition from liberation movement to functioning state was never really completed. The SPLM was organized around loyalty to commanders, not around a constitution. When it became a government, it largely converted its command structure directly into a state apparatus. Ministries, governorships, contracts, and oil revenue all flowed through the same men who had once commanded battalions in the bush. There was no serious land reform, no independent judiciary, no professional army. The institutions that had fought the war simply became the institutions that ran the country.
Kiir's personal style made this both better and worse. He is not a dominating personality. He prefers to manage, to smooth over disputes, to keep the country's powerful figures inside the tent. This preserved a degree of unity for a while—but it also meant the state never grew bigger than the personalities who controlled it.
The fracture of December 2013
The rupture came in December 2013. A confrontation within the presidential guard escalated into open fighting in the capital, and within days violence spread across the country along ethnic lines. Kiir's support base was predominantly Dinka; his former vice president, Riek Machar, who had been dismissed months earlier, drew on largely Nuer support. Both sides committed atrocities. International investigators documented widespread extrajudicial killings, rape, and the forced displacement of entire communities.
For the next two years, the country burned. The oil fields that fund almost everything the state does were damaged and shut down. Inflation soared. Doctors, teachers, and soldiers went unpaid. In 2017, an official famine was declared in parts of the country—the first such declaration on the continent in years and a profound humiliation for a nation with agricultural potential and petroleum wealth.
Kiir has said many times that he wants peace. And yet, at every critical moment, he has chosen to hold on to power rather than share it in a way that might have preserved stability. The peace agreement signed in 2015 collapsed within months. The revitalized agreement of 2018, reached under intense regional and international pressure, eventually brought Machar back to Juba as first vice president in 2020. But the unity government that resulted has functioned less as a government than as an uneasy standoff. Elections have been postponed repeatedly; the December 2024 target came and went without a vote.
The center that does not hold
A great deal of commentary on Kiir paints him as a classic strongman. The truth is more unsettling. He resembles less an all-controlling dictator and more the chairman of a board of armed stakeholders—a first among equals in a security elite that includes generals, businesspeople, and ethnic leaders who can each threaten the state if they are cut out of its spoils. This is why his rivals are rarely removed permanently; they are bought off, pardoned, and re-appointed. It is also why the country's security forces so often act like private armies answerable to individuals rather than to the law.
The cost has been enormous. South Sudan now has one of the largest refugee and internally displaced populations in the world relative to the size of its country. The economy is perpetually on the edge of collapse. Public services are minimal. International arms embargoes and sanctions have limited the state's ability to rebuild, while its own institutions have been implicated in some of the conflict's worst abuses. The country that was supposed to be Africa's newest success story has instead become a warning about what happens when liberation is not followed by genuine state-building.
A country waiting for the answer
The hardest question facing South Sudan is the one nobody inside it can yet answer with confidence: What comes after Kiir? He is in his early seventies, with no defined successor. The ruling party has no reliable electoral machinery. Armed groups remain loyal to men, not to institutions. And the recent history of the country gives a grim preview of what a leadership struggle might look like.
Whatever comes next, the historical judgment on Salva Kiir will likely be split. He led one of the most consequential independence movements of modern Africa. He also proved unable—or unwilling—to convert that independence into a functioning, peaceful state. He is not the sole author of South Sudan's suffering; the country's troubles run much deeper than any single leader. But as the man at the top, with the most authority and the most responsibility, he remains the unavoidable figure in the story.
The cowboy hat is still there, the smile still somewhere beneath it. What is missing is the country that the crowds on the streets of Juba believed, in July 2011, they had finally won. They were right that independence was a victory. What they could not have known—and what their leaders failed to prepare for—is that independence was also the beginning of a different kind of struggle, one that required a different kind of leadership.