Africa-Press – South-Sudan. Four members of the South Sudan Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM-IO) are part of the 18-member committee that will study President Salva Kiir’s speech read out during the first joint session of the legislature for 2023, on March 27, 2023.
The SPLM got the majority share with six members, while the South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA), two from the Other Political Party (OPP) each had two representatives.
The other members consist of three support staff from the Council of States and the Reconstituted Transitional National Legislative Assembly and one from the National Agenda.
The select committee was established on Monday during a joint session of the Transitional National Legislature.
The lawmakers also approved a motion for a vote of thanks on the president’s speech that was submitted to the House for consideration by the government chief whip, Rebecca Joshua. The session was presided over by the Speaker of the Council of States, Deng Deng Akoon.
It is customary for the legislature to send the president’s speech to a select committee for discussion on the subject he raised.
John Agany, the Reconstituted Transitional National Legislative Assembly’s spokesperson and chair of the information-specific committee, said the committee’s work will be to examine the speech for 14 days and then submit its findings to the House in order to approve it as a working policy.
Agany said the president’s speech requires consideration by the parliament due to the directives he has given the government, particularly those that are intended for specific institutions to carry out. The president’s address, he continued, becomes government policy after being discussed and passed by the parliament.
“You will never have it unless the National Legislature puts it in an official form and it becomes the law of the land.” So it is important to be deliberated at this level because this is where policies are made and passed,” he asserted.
“So the session is basically tabling the speech of the president and then referring it to a select committee, which will work on it in the next 14 days and then report to the National Legislature for passing and making it a full document for the government to operate on.”
Agany stated that the committees in the parliament will work with appropriate institutions to follow through on the president’s pledges, such as the committee of the Constituency Development Fund (CDF).
The president discussed the process of putting the peace agreement into practice in his speech, as well as the work that needs to be done in order to conduct free, fair, and credible elections in December 2024, when the roadmap transition comes to an end.
In addition, Kiir based his remarks on the peace process with the holdout South Sudan opposition group, which is not a party to the revitalized peace deal, and on the development, economics, environment, and foreign policy of the country.
He instructed the finance ministry in particular to make resources available so that the ministries and institutions he mentioned—those that deal with issues of development, economy, environment, and foreign policy—could carry out their plans.
According to Kiir, the government’s agenda for service delivery has been impacted by the conflict that began in 2013 and the state of the economy; as a result, the government has hardly allocated resources for development since 2013.
Source: The City Review South Sudan
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