Riek Machar is ousted as leader of the opposition party in South Sudan by a faction

First Vice-President Riek Machar, who is under house arrest, was replaced as party head by members of a splinter faction, causing a crisis for South Sudan’s major opposition party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO), according to a Nation Media faction story on Wednesday, April 7.

Top party leaders mostly abstained from the contentious meeting held in Juba on Wednesday, which resulted in the appointment of Stephen Par Kuol as interim chairman.

The group also appointed Agok Makur as interim secretary-general and Lasuba Wango, a former Federal Affairs minister, as deputy interim chairman.

Important SPLM-I0 officials Regina Joseph Kaba, the secretary-general of the party, and Machar’s wife, Interior Minister Angelina Teny, were conspicuously absent.

With loyalists condemning the gathering as illegitimate and politically motivated, their absence highlighted the widening rift among the group.

Following the announcement, Par declared that Oyet Nathaniel Pierino, Machar’s deputy and now exiled, would be suspended immediately.

Par proclaimed, “Someone who fled cannot run the affairs of the movement from Facebook,” while maintaining that the SPLM-IO headquarters should not be located online but rather in Juba.

As a result of Machar’s limited mobility under what many refer to as politically driven house detention, the “ouster” is the result of internal party strife.

In a statement earlier this week, Oyet suspended Par and other individuals for allegedly conspiring with President Salva Kiir’s administration to depose Dr. Machar.

This could be the most significant split in SPLM-IO since its founding in 2013, according to observers, and it comes at a crucial time when a peace agreement for 2018 is all but dead.

South Sudanese anticipate that the Iransitional government of National Unity, as the coalition government is known, will undergo yet another upheaval, including the formal appointment of Stephen Par as First Vice President, a role that Machar presently occupies.

If verified, this would disrupt the fragile power-sharing structure put up in the 2018 peace deal, which constituted the coalition that included SPLM-IO, and lead to a more serious political crisis in the nation.

According to observers, replacing Machar without agreement would essentially nullify the revitalized peace deal, igniting concerns about new instability in the youngest country in the world.