Let begin by paying tribute to Gen, John Koang Nyuon who passed away in Nairobi Kenya this week Gen, Koang was a selfies nationalist and dedicated liberation war hero who worked relentlessly for the attainment of our freedom. On behalf of the government, I would like to once again convey my deepest condolences to his family, his colleagues in the liberation struggle and those who are affected by his death. We will always remember this great son of South Sudan for eternity.
Fellow citizens
Today we close the year 2022 and will be welcoming 2023 in hours. As we reflect on the successes and challenges of the year 2022, we must remember that we made some achievements because we had political will and the same spirit should be maintained in order for us to collectively find solutions to social and political challenges that awaits in 2023, More importantly, we must learn from mistakes in 2022 as we usher in the new year.
This year’s Christmas celebration has been largely peaceful in urban Centres across the country, Unfortunately. Some of our citizens in some parts of our country did not celebrate this Festive season, because of sub-national violence. The actors behind this senseless violence subjected our people to suffering for their own selfish political gains, but the reality is that this violence benefits no one. In fact, it further relegates our efforts towards achieving durable peace, security and delivering developmental services to our citizens I’m appealing to those who are fueling this conflict, please stop it and join us in working to promote peaceful coexistence among our communities.
Dear Compatriots
We have come a long way since we signed the Revitalized peace. Agreement in September 2018, The revitalized peace Agreement is an ambitious and complex document, but we signed it because we wanted to end the suffering of our people.
The difficulties associated with peace Agreement affected the pace of implementation of some of its provisions. This situation was not also helped by our partners refusal to support us with resources to speed up the implementation of the Agreement Despite all these, we have worked hard to implement the chapters on responsibilities sharing and transitional security arrangement. We also made progress on other chapters. While significant progress was achieved, we fell short on implementing some provisions. And since we do not want to rerun our country to war, we agreed new a Roadmap that extends the transitional period by 24 months. This the time we felt was needed to address the implementation of the provision we fell short in , fellow citizens The agreement on the Roadmap was reached by the parties via a consensus without external directions personally, I consider the agreement by the parties to extend the transitional period as a key millstone in our political history because it demonstrated political maturity on our part as a country .For I think all the parties to the Agreement for their cooperation an urge them to maintains this spirit to implement the Roadmap.
As parties to the Agreement, we are aware that the end game of the Revitalized Peace. Agreement is the holding of transparent, fair and credible elections. Before we reach to that point there are key steps we need to take and these are the reasons why we extended the transitional period. We need to conduct a population census, have a permanent constitution in place as well as elections laws among others. There are tasks before us now and they need our collective effort some accomplished This work has already started. Your parliament has enacted some bills and ratified some international treaties There are aimed at effecting in our systems of governance, I have for example assented the bills .
