A faction of the SPLM led by President Salva Kiir has rubbished the alleged upcoming leadership conference in Rumbek to restructure the governing party.
Information has been circulating on social media that SPLM was planning a high-level party meeting in Rumbek, the capital of Lakes State, this month to discuss its reorganization and the Kiir succession.
However, a senior party official told Radio Tamazuj on Monday that the information was unfounded.
“Anything to do with the party gathering, a meeting, or a conference of any sort has to start from the National Secretariat. We don’t have any such information,” the SPLM Secretary for Political Affairs and Mobilization, Santo Malek, said.
“We don’t have official information from the leadership. I even talked to the Secretary-General (Peter Lam Both) about this and he said there was nothing like that. It is the SPLM Political Bureaus which directs, but there is nothing like that,” he added.
Kiir has been South Sudan’s president since 2011, when it gained independence. Claims of his ill health have been circulating for years, especially on social media, but government officials have always denied them.
Kiir, who is in his 70s, became leader of the SPLM after the death of the founding father, John Garang, in a plane crash in 2005, after the second civil war in Sudan, which lasted 21 years. The war and its consequences claimed over 2 million lives and displaced millions of others.
South Sudan is currently run by a Transitional Government of National Unity, which recently extended its mandate by another two years.
The extension shifts the end of the transitional period under the 2018 Revitalized Peace Agreement from February 2025 to February 2027, and moves the elections from December 2024 to December 2026.