Majak D'Agoot, former deputy defence minister, South Sudan HARDtalk

-- from me. Now it's time for HARDtalk.

It took half a century of civil war to give

Just five years later, leading figures from the independence

struggle are calling for the UN to take charge.

Majak D'Agoot fought in the war of independence,

became deputy minister of defence, but was sacked by the president

Have South Sudan's politicians failed their starving,

displaced people or was the South never viable as a separate country

You are talking to us from Nairobi, rather than from South Sudan.

The crisis in the country has sent us to different points

of the compass, and I find myself being in exile and being in Nairobi

It is because of the crisis that broke out in my country

It took some of us to jail and powers sent a huge part

of the South Sudanese population into displacement.

Some of them are now in neighbouring countries,

amounting to about 1.5 million refugees.

Some of them are internally displaced, some of them

are in the protection camps guarded by soldiers.

That is the state of affairs in my country and that is why I am

The government says your passport and those of others was revoked

for calling for foreign intervention in the country.

Gordon Buay is the man who handles the South Sudanese diaspora

He said there was no freedom for you to call for the toppling

of the government in South Sudan and suggesting that South Sudan

would be ruled by the United Nations?

First of all, let me underscore this.

There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of movement.

There is no freedom of movement for the people in South Sudan.

South Sudan is kind of a big prison at the moment.

The government has imposed draconic measures on the entire population.

So, when we called for intervention forces to come to the country

and restore security and stabilise the situation,

so that there is public safety for all, that was because the government

of South Sudan has, unfortunately, squandered its very role

Sorry to interrupt, the former Secretary General of the ruling

Sudan People's Liberation Movement, a colleague of yours,

has founded a group called South Sudan Reborn, which he says

is to bring the violence to an end by calling on the United Nations

South Sudan Reborn are not the political leaders

We are a political entity in the country, we present the voice

of the majority of our people who call for democracy

The President is a democratically elected president.

His legitimacy derives from the agreement which was signed

in Adis in 2015, August of last year.

Are you then calling for the United Nations

to have a role in the governance of your country?

If not, what alternatives are you seeking?

I am calling for the deployment of regional protection forces

to restore peace and stability to my country.

To help in opening up democratic space for all the political forces

in the country, to be able to participate and express

their views without fear and intimidation.

I have not called for administration of South Sudan by the United Nations

because I know the country, it is independent and it is not

a member state of the United Nations, unless it is by the free

will of its people, it cannot be a trustee of the United Nations.

Last Friday, the UN Security Council agreed to increase the number

of peacekeepers in Sudan from 12,000 to 16,000.

Even that, in view of the Sudan government, seriously

undermines your country's hard-won sovereignty.

The government Information Minister said it will begin with South Sudan,

but it will end up with all of us being turned into new colonies.

The government Information Minister said it will begin with South Sudan,

but it will end up with all of us being turned into new colonies.

I would say this is a bogeyman phobia behalf of Juba.

I would say this is a bogeyman phobia on behalf of Juba.

The United Nations has no interest in colonising South Sudan,

there is no single colony in the world as we speak.

The entire world has been decolonised.

These kind of statements are coming out in order to mobilise

the population and direct them against their bogeymen,

that being the United Nations, the United African Union,

the United States of America, and other countries.

The fact of the matter is that the government in Juba has

completely failed to discharge its authority

There are deficits in the discharge of public authority,

one is that they are not able to form their role in the provision

It is in this view that we have decided to call for the deployment

of this force, so that our people are able to see peace,

see stability in the country that has been rocked for far too long

by instability and the threat of being harmed by the very forces

that should be discharging this function.

The trouble is that even if you have these troops coming in to help

with operations on the ground, the record of the UN peacekeepers

Sites that are currently providing shelter to 190,000 South Sudanese

people, scattered across the country, displaced

by the fighting, peacekeepers, according to reports,

have been said to be incapable of protecting civilians.

We have had the UN humanitarian agency saying they have been forced

to cut food assistance in half for the South Sudanese

Never, says the acting UNHCR representative to Uganda,

never has the gap between what is being provided

First of all, in terms of forces in South Sudan and elsewhere

But the fact of the matter is that this depends

The mandate that the UN missions have.

In South Sudan, this has been a peacekeeping mission.

What we are talking about now is a protection force that

will have a mandate of classifying spoilers,

that will have an amendment of protecting civilians,

protecting important installations in the capital.

Basically, the mandate of the protection force

is completely different from the mandate you have specified.

I am sorry to interrupt you, but I want to be clear

You have used the word pacify, and as I hear that, that suggests

that troops would have the ability, if necessary, to kill South Sudanese

who they regarded as being damaging to public interest.

Is that right? Yes.

South Sudanese who are spoilers trying to damage public interest

or stability and public safety will be targeted by these forces.

This is what the summit of the South African head of state

discussed in the past and which the UN Security Council

It goes without saying, if South Sudanese have decided,

some of the South Sudanese which you may call a gun class,

have decided to hold their population

hostage, it is incumbent upon the world, upon the African

continent, to come in and free these hostages.

Let me put to you what a Sudanese broadcaster wrote in

the Huffington Post at the start of the month.

He said, our sovereignty wasn't an accident of history or a donation

We cherish statehood and our glaring failures of self governors must not

A force with a mandate to disarm our national army and take

a Somalia in the Republic of South Sudan.

South Sudan is already on the path to Somalia,

with or without the deployment of the protection force.

It is true that this country was earned through the blood

of our civilians, and through some of us.

I was shot twice in the war, I shed blood for it.

But this is not the South Sudan that we had fought for

So, the kind of South Sudan which is at the capture of the gun

class, at the capture of the military aristocrats,

and which this particular individual you have cited is trying to promote,

that is not the kind of South Sudan that we fought for.

I suspect that Mr Ngor would not say he was seeking

to promote that, but you have raised the idea of the gun class

or what some might call the warlords who are terrorising your country.

You were Deputy Defence Minister when the new Republic

We did a lot of things to transform the armed forces,

and we did a lot of things in terms of security sector reform.

If you go back to the beginning of that short history,

we have done everything possible to be able to transform South Sudan

from being a country under the control of the military

to being a country where the military and security forces

are subservient to the will of a democratically elected government.

You accept your share of responsibility for

I don't think I share in a responsibility in that,

because I tried to do my best in terms of transforming

We got all the obstacles because the chief executive officer

of this organisation that we worked under

He wanted the gun class to have power in terms of running

the country and in terms of taking the country on the path it

Is one of the problems here summed up in the dysfunctional relationship

between President Salva Kiir and his former vice president,

Machar, who was sacked and is currently in Khartoum

One represents the Dinka and one the Nuer, the largest ethnic groups

South Sudan was trying to unite those that cannot be united,

and do not want to be united, and you can't overcome that.

The ethnic dimension of the root causes of conflict in South Sudan

are not key in the way they are being portrayed

The fact of the matter is, there are two individuals

who were at the helm of power in South Sudan,

who had untamed and still have untamed ambition

One trying to retain power by all means, using violence,

the other trying to climb to power through the same methods

And it is this that has ripped the country apart.

It is not the ethnic people of South Sudan,

it is not the tribes, that are responsible for the crisis

Given this kind of inclination by these leaders to violence,

and the use of ethnicity as an instrument of consolidating

It has become necessary that South Sudan can do without the two.

In July 2013, both you and another man were among the ministers

dismissed when President Kiir dismissed his entire Cabinet.

I wonder if this demand for intervention is a case

No, I don't think it amounts to that.

The fact is, on the ground, is that the government of the day

has failed its responsibilities, in terms of protecting the people.

They have failed their responsibilities in terms

That ensures the public safety of the people of South Sudan.

It is in that light that we are now calling for the -

for this protection force, at least to provide those critical

public services that the government of the day has completely

Now, in July, as I say, you were sacked along with the rest

At the end of December, you and a number of your colleagues

had a news conference in which you accused President Kiir

of surrendering the Sudanese people's liberation movement

You effectively said he is on track to form a personal army,

and you were subsequently charged and put on trial,

The foreign minister, Barnaba Marial Benjamin,

This has been investigated by the African Committee of Inquiry,

The findings are out there, and it is very clear

that there was not an attempted coup.

There is a recently published book which has made it clear

that there was no attempted coup, and so all the findings are pointing

to the fact that there was a mutiny within the republican guard.

But what happened after that, President Kiir saw it

as an opportunity to spread his net to engulf all those that he wanted

The government says the charges were dropped in the interests

This is completely nonsense because, in the first place, we went

We were put on trial on trumped-up charges.

The case of the government collapsed, and they decided,

six days before the court could pass its judgement,

its final verdict, they decided to stop the process,

and claiming all these kinds of things.

Sorry to interrupt you, you have described the country

as in effect leaderless at the moment.

In an interview you gave with Voice of America,

you are critical of both the President and his

But what happens now, in that vacuum?

We heard from United Nations nearly 5 million people urgently need food,

Growth is down 60%, inflation has hit 50%,

Poverty is up, but things are more expensive.

There are 12,000 child soldiers, according to Unicef.

This is a country which, five years after its independence,

seems to be teetering on the verge of collapse.

It is teetering on the verge of collapse because of bad

leadership, and that is why we put it issue of leadership at the centre

Because, if it was not under bad leadership,

South Sudan would have not come to this kind of situation.

And so the main issue to address at the moment is to have South Sudan

back on the trails, led by different leaders.

They are there in the multitude of South Sudanese.

They are within the 10 million South Sudanese.

Well, the most important thing at the moment is to create

the necessary conditions, the necessary prerequisites,

for the people of South Sudan to exercise their rights,

It is not up to me to determine who those leaders for the people

The trouble is, you have said in this interview already that

you were not involved in the coup attempt,

and yet you have made it absolutely clear that you want an armed

intervention, which would clearly not be led by the political

This would have the authority to, if necessary, shoot to kill those

who are regarded as destabilising the country.

That isn't democratic, that is not about South Sudanese

So isn't the allegation which I read out to you at the start,

from Gordib Buay, the Ambassador in charge of Diaspora

in the United States, absolutely correct, that

you are calling for the overthrow of the government of South Sudan?

Are people of South Sudan capable of overthrowing the government,

should this be the path they want to follow?

The people of South Sudan are capable of changing

their leaders through democratic means.

What is happening at the moment is that the people of South Sudan

are under capture by the gun class, and they ought to be set free.

They ought to be liberated from the capture of the gun class.

Unless you create that atmosphere where people of South Sudan

are capable of voicing out what they see as undemocratic,

what they see as autocratic, what they see as unacceptable

from the behaviour of their leaders, the country is not going

The country is stuck with leaders who have taken the country hostage.

And that is why you need this kind of transition,

where you have a new leadership, where you have a security for all,

where you have the possibility of the people of South Sudan

Majak D'Agoot, former deputy defence minister of South Sudan,

thank you very much for being on HARDtalk.

Still a few thunderstorms around at the moment,

but they will be clearing out of the way, and for most of us

Dry and bright, with sunny spells in most places.