Monica Manyual has never heard of Ukraine but her son started starving when the first bombs went off in Kyi. Stretched out on a blue cloth in a hospital bed in Tonj, in northeastern South Sudan, Nyibol does not react to his mother's caresses and breathes rapidly, as if his skeletal body wanted to cling to a life that was dying. escapes him. He has blank eyes: at eleven months, he suffers from malaria, acute diarrhea and weighs only five kilos. If he had any strength left, which he doesn't have much, he wouldn't be able to suckle at his mother's breasts either. Monica is malnourished and has no milk because she has hardly eaten for weeks. “Before she could buy something for my children, but she no longer has enough. Life is hard now,” she says.
The increase in the price of food and fuel due to the war in Ukraine, which has doubled the cost of basic cereals such as wheat, corn or sorghum, has triggered hunger in the youngest country in the world: 8.9 of its 12.4 million inhabitants need urgent humanitarian aid. In a country with 80% of the population poor, the rise has left millions without a network: seven out of ten South Sudanese are hungry and more than half are children in the worst hunger crisis since their independence from Sudan in 2011 .
In a country the size of France with 2% of paved roads, the rise in fuel prices due to the Ukrainian conflict has also raised the cost of distributing increasingly scarce aid.
The need to derive funds to deal with the Ukrainian emergency has cut aid to other crises such as that of the African country. In the summer, the World Food Program admitted that the cuts would leave 1.7 million South Sudanese without help. “It is a drastic cut,” said Marwa Awad, WFP spokesperson, “because it is a third of the total number of people that we know need our food aid, but we have had to make a selection; decide who we can continue to help and who we can stop helping, not because they don't need it but because they can survive.
In the northeast of the country, one of the regions hardest hit by hunger, the governor of the city of Tonj, Marco Agor Malang, spares euphemisms such as cutting or redistributing. Agor unhesitatingly points to Ukraine to explain why only 45.4% of the money budgeted by the United Nations has arrived to deal with the crisis in South Sudan. “We ask humanitarian agencies to come help us but there is no positive response, they tell us that all donors are now focusing on what is happening in Ukraine and Russia. This is what it is".
What there is is a full malnourished ward, with 16 wasted children who must be discharged hastily (most in four days when 15 or more should stay) to make room for the next ones. Because of the cutbacks, the hospital has cut staff from 80 to 70 workers and relies on donations from NGOs to provide food for its patients. Josephine Achol, head of nutrition at the center, believes that the high prices have left thousands of families unable to react, but the situation will get worse because of the clouds: the torrential rains of the last two months have caused floods that have affected over 600,000 people and destroyed thousands of hectares of crops. "People have not been able to grow crops because of the rains, many have lost everything."
An hour down the sandy road from the hospital, in the village of Mabior, the elderly Paul Ateng walks with his sandals in hand so as not to lose them in the mud. He walks between the green stems, knee-deep in water, staring off into space. As far as he can see there are only waterlogged sorghum and corn crops, rotting in the sun, and the pointed roofs of a dozen abandoned shacks loom on the horizon. Ateng has high cheekbones, a white beard, and doesn't even bother to roll up his red pants to keep from getting wet. He doesn't answer the questions, he just repeats a wail as he points his arm to nowhere.
“We have nothing, there is nothing left. You see it? All these were crops, our food. Everything is flooded, there is nothing left. We are hungry".
Although South Sudan is a victim of its topography, with the center of the territory at a lower altitude than its ends and which forms a kind of funnel for the rains that fall in neighboring Ethiopia or Uganda, at a higher altitude, Nhial Tiitmamer, director of the think tank Sudd Institute, warns of the current exceptionality. "Since 1991, the country has experienced 27 floods, almost a crisis a year, but for four years, the situation has worsened (...) These floods are by far the most serious due to the amount of rainfall and the extension of the affected territory" . Blaming climate change is shooting with carnations. Despite the warnings from heaven, the floods have fully impacted the population because the government has done nothing, just a few temporary dams, to protect its citizens. Tiitmaner, an expert in sociology and climate change, does not hide his indignation at the government's negligence and highlights the magnitude of the emergency: “if all those affected by the floods since 2018 are added, the figure reaches four million people, one of every three South Sudanese.”
For Muzamil Sebi, spokesperson for Save the Children, to understand hunger in the country you have to add the smell of gunpowder. “The pandemic also affected it, but in addition to the floods and the war in Ukraine, there is inter-community violence that also forces people to flee and they cannot farm. The situation is critical".
The echoes of the Ukraine and the floods are unexpected blows to a population accustomed to the ax blows of an eternal conflict - for the last 59 years, the population has lived 40 years in war and since 2018, after a cardboard peace agreement, it has suffered 1,077 episodes of violence—but mostly because of the greed of corrupt and irresponsible rulers.
The instability of South Sudan is not an ethnic or inevitable issue, but rather stems from an unjust past, under the yoke of the Ottomans, British or Sudanese, and from a hasty independence applauded by the international community, hungry for its oil, which he left the country in the hands of leaders without training or democratic culture.
The country lives prisoner of a militarized system based on identity patronage. The president, Dinka, has five vice presidents who represent the main ethnic groups and a parliament of more than 500 members who buy loyalties and take advantage of historical enmities between communities. Despite this scenario, the international community insists on the signing of hollow peace agreements that lead the country to apparently democratic elections in 2025.
The result of this clientelistic and militarized system, without a free press, is violence and more hunger.
For Yar Monybut Malith, 40, violence between his ethnic Atok and rival Awans in his village of Rualbet killed one child, separated him from four and nearly starved four more. She lives in an adobe shack in the town of Tieth where there is only a bed and an old suitcase. The suitcase isn't even hers because, she says, she didn't give her time to take anything. “They started shooting and we ran, but they hit my son Abumbor and killed him. I came here with four children and another four fled to Tonj. Now we have nothing and we are very hungry.”
The violence started because an atok boy got a young awan pregnant and then refused to marry her. As revenge, the girl's outraged brother killed her father's brother on the run. That's where months of tribal-scented deaths and revenge began. But not only. Enko Alok, displaced like Yar and who asks us to change his name, whispers without being heard by the intelligence members who follow the journalist. “Soldiers came and said they wanted to mediate but they were on the side of the awan. They started killing our people, burning houses and stealing our cows. The soldiers were the ones who killed us. They made us flee."
Now, he denounces, his lands, his cows, that power, are in the power of another.
