Africa-Press – South-Sudan. A member of parliament has criticised the recent ratification of four trade deals with the United Arab Emirates, saying the agreements benefit the elites and do not help ordinary citizens.
The agreements include visa exemptions, air services, double taxation, and investment.
The Transitional National Legislative Assembly passed the four agreements during an extraordinary sitting held last week.
However, lawmaker Atem Garang de Kuek said the deals were rushed through parliament without enough time to study and examine them properly.
“Those agreements are against our interest as a nation, they are against our economy, they are against our security. We are a fragile nation, we are in a fragile region, and therefore we have to be very careful. Those agreements or MoUs, one of them considered to have been drafted as an agreement 10 years ago, and it was not brought to assembly.
“It gives a question that the situation between us and Emirates and what I call geo-politics in our region during the last 10 years has changed so much. It has changed so much even Sudan is not the same Sudan,” he said.
Kuek, who is also an SPLM lawmaker, said some of the agreements were drafted ten years ago and should have been reviewed again due to changes in the region’s geo-politics.
“People could have sat down, restudied again, how will those agreements benefit us after 10 years from thinking of them? Some of them were signed six years ago, 2019. So there was nothing new about them. Why am against those our of them, all of them? They don’t have benefit as they are illusions, elite illusions,” he said.
He said there should have been a thorough study of the deals before ratifying them.
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