Mamer Abraham
Africa-Press – South-Sudan. Members of the South Sudan national legislative assembly beat a Friday midnight deadline to elect nine representatives to the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA).
The elections attracted 25 candidates, all who were battling for the nine slots reserved for each member state at the EALA.
Sudan’s People Liberation Movement (SPLM) party presented five nominees, while SPLM-IO under had two candidates. South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA) had one with Other Political Parties (OPP) fronting two. The race also attracted 15 independent candidates and one from USAP Party.
After close to 10 hours of lobbying and vote casting, SPLM-IG dominated with all their candidates sailing through with SPLM-IG pushing through all their candidates. Two other independent candidates for a total of nine South Sudanese representatives at the regional parliament.
But TNLA lawmaker Mayen Deng Alier says that there is more than meets the eye in the ‘independent candidates’ category.
“Despite the fact that independent candidates do not belong to any political party, it is not lost on us that the two MPs first contested in SPLM primaries and it is only after they failed to go through that they chose the independent path without the backing of their party,” he says.
If at all the two independent MPs will align themselves with the mother party – SPLM – then that means that the ruling party had seven MPs against SPLM-IO’s two.
Prior to their election, the SPLM National Secretary for Political Affairs and Mobilization, Kuol Atem Bol said the party would punish members if they voted for independent candidates, but such punishment has seemed not to surface after the elections, and the votes these independent candidates scooped might not be ruled out to not have come from SPLM members.
Thomas Dut Gatkek who was voted out of EALA South Sudan’s Chapter over recruitment row has been left out in the recent list.
Last year, South Sudanese MPs at EALA, protested the East African Community (EAC) recruitment process after only 14 South Sudanese were shortlisted at the EAC Secretariat jobs compared to other member states who had more than fifty shortlisted members.
South Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi later teamed up against Kenya and Tanzania saying that the two countries were discriminating against the other countries and allotting themselves many jobs in EAC Secretariat.
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