South Sudan’s government and opposition groups are scheduled to meet this afternoon to discuss the implementation matrix, a vital step for adoption of a detailed timetable to implement the peace deal.
The step comes after South Sudan's conflicting parties initialled the final peace deal on Thursday.
Ambassador Ismail Wais, IGAD special envoy for South Sudan, has announced that the taskforce which includes Sudan, Uganda and the IGAD secretariat would meet in Khartoum this morning to review the implementation matrix before the South Sudan parties could start developing the implementation matrix around 3 pm.
The IGAD official said discussions on the implementation matrix, which is crucial for the effective implementation of the peace pact, is expected to conclude over weekend.
“We will continue with the matrix and it will go through Sunday if we don’t succeed to conclude it on Saturday. The implementation matrix will be ready for initialling at the same time,” he said.
“The following day, we will start with Chapter Two which is called the CTSAMM workshop. In that workshop, we planned for two days and only if it not possible to conclude within two days, we will go to the third day. The security personnel and specialists of the parties assisted by the taskforce will try their best to work on the details of the implementation matrix, and it can be operationalized during the implementation phase,” he added.
Wais revealed that the IGAD Council of Ministers will meet to approve the initialled peace documents and seek guidance as to how to address the pending issues in the initialled peace deal.
The IGAD council of ministers meeting, Wais said, will be followed by the IGAD summit. “In that summit, they will determine the date of signing the document of the final revitalized ARCISS 2018,” he said.
For his part, Sudan’s foreign minister Al-Dirdiri Mohamed Ahmed said all the agreed security arrangements would be discussed in details.