On March 7, 2026, the EAC made an unusual decision. At its summit in Arusha, it skipped South Sudan for the post of secretary-general and chose a Tanzanian diplomat instead. South Sudan’s own lawmakers said the reason was non-payment. The country owed about $21.8 million in unpaid dues. The opening could add: “South Sudan’s own lawmakers confirmed the reason: unpaid dues estimated at $21 million. As one Ugandan legislator put it, ‘If we appoint a secretary general from a partner state that is not contributing, it will be a dilemma.’ It was a rare moment of institutional candour. It was also a verdict on a decade of membership that should never have begun when it did.
South Sudan joined the East African Community in 2016. It was a mistake then. It remains a mistake now. The mistake was not the idea of regional integration itself. On the contrary, that idea is sound. Africa needs strong regional blocs if continental integration is to mean anything. Regional economic communities can serve as building blocks for African integration, but only when integration is sequenced properly. In principle, pooling sovereignty allows small economies to achieve scale, attract investment, widen markets, cut trade costs, improve bargaining power, negotiate from strength, and prepare the ground for continental integration. In practice, such blocs work only when they impose meaningful entry standards and enforce them.
South Sudan’s admission into the EAC came too early, before the country had the institutions, productive base, infrastructure, and legal capacity needed to benefit from deep integration. That was a strategic mistake. It did not turn South Sudan into a stronger regional partner or competitor. It exposed a fragile state to obligations it could not meet, opened a weak economy more fully to stronger neighbours, and added strain to a bloc that already struggles to enforce its own rules. That sequencing error matters because South Sudan was not entering a debating club. It was entering a customs union, a common market, and a legal order in which Community law takes precedence in relevant areas.
Integration works only when standards are real
The EAC is a customs union, a common market, and a legal and institutional project. That means membership is supposed to rest on more than symbolism. It requires entry standards, implementation discipline, and the capacity to absorb both competition and opportunity. This is important for a Community that is a market-driven, export-oriented project meant to deepen co-operation, distribute benefits equitably, and, in time, support the wider African integration agenda. For the EAC to serve its larger purpose, it must be stronger than the sum of its members in the dimensions that matter for integration: rule of law, customs administration, regulatory coherence, productive capacity, and macroeconomic discipline. A bloc that admits members who cannot meet these conditions does not become stronger. It becomes diluted.
That is where South Sudan’s accession went wrong. The EAC Treaty is clear that new members should meet standards of governance, rule of law, and policy compatibility. Those standards exist for a reason. A regional bloc cannot generate shared gains if one member enters with almost none of the conditions needed to benefit from market opening. The EAC first considered giving South Sudan observer status until it met the entry conditions. That would have been the safer course. Instead, the bloc moved to full membership. One reason was South Sudan’s oil wealth and wider resource potential. Political calculation won out over institutional discipline.
The claim that South Sudan joined the EAC before it was ready is not a retrospective judgment. It was stated clearly at the time. In 2015, the attorneys general of all five existing member states went to the East African Court of Justice seeking to stop its admission, arguing that South Sudan did not satisfy the EAC Treaty’s basic principles of good governance, democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. The court dismissed the petition on procedural grounds without ruling on whether South Sudan actually met the governance criteria. What was absent from this political calculation was a serious national answer to the question that South Sudan’s own legislators asked in 2011: could the country actually benefit from membership, and could it meet its obligations? The answer, in both cases, was no then and remains no now.
The best evidence that South Sudan joined too early comes not from critics abroad, but from South Sudan’s own official integration strategy. It says EAC customs obligations would require an “overall overhaul” of customs operations, a faster rollout of the National Revenue Authority, new organisational structures, more capacity, more money, and more training. It adds that donor support would be needed because capacity was so limited. On the common market, it says the country would need a painstaking review and harmonisation of laws and a restructuring of bureaucratic procedures. In plain English, South Sudan joined first and planned to build the state later.
South Sudan did not enter from a position of readiness. It entered from a position of fragility. The country was still emerging from conflict. State institutions were weak. Administrative systems were thin. Much of the economy was narrowly tied to oil. In other words, it joined while still building the basic machinery of the state.
One can understand why South Sudan wanted in. Joining East Africa’s most advanced regional bloc carried political prestige. It promised a larger market, easier movement, and a place at the regional table. Supporters argued that membership could help lock in reform. That argument was not frivolous. But reform cannot be locked in by treaty language alone. It also requires institutions that can apply the treaty in practice.
In South Sudan’s case, that gap between paper and practice was wide from the start. The country was given a transition period that expired in 2019. Yet years later implementation was still lagging. EAC ministers were still urging Juba to domesticate core Common Market and Customs Union rules. There has been some progress. Visa restrictions have eased. Some roadblocks have been removed. Border post systems and customs training have improved in places. But these are preparatory steps. They are not proof of deep regional integration.
Integration is not costless. Once a country joins a customs union and common market, it accepts real constraints. It loses room to use tariffs freely. It undertakes legal harmonisation. It must align customs procedures, standards, and regulations. Stronger states can carry those burdens. Weaker ones often struggle. If the weaker state also lacks the capacity to compete, the effect is not convergence. It is exposure.
South Sudan entered as a buyer, not a builder
The problem becomes even clearer once one looks at the economy South Sudan brought into the bloc. It was not a diversified producer ready to seize a larger market. It was, and remains, heavily dependent on oil and imports. South Sudan’s own strategy states that the country is crucially dependent on imports for the vast majority of consumer goods. The World Bank has been even blunter. It describes trade with Uganda as uni-directional, says most consumption items, including food, come in through Nimule, and shows South Sudan running large trade deficits with Uganda and Kenya because non-oil exports are negligible. This is the opposite of the position from which a country usually benefits most from deep regional market opening.
Instead, regional goods flow into South Sudan. Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, and Sudanese traders supply the country’s food, fuel, construction materials, and services. South Sudan relies on imports from Uganda and Kenya even for basic food staples, a dependency that deepens with every conflict and flood. A South Sudanese legislator identified this risk in 2011, predicting the country would become a ‘dumping ground’. He was right. The EAC admitted it anyway.
That asymmetry is not a minor technicality. It shapes who gains. In theory, EAC membership gives South Sudan access to a large nearby market. In practice, the more immediate and measurable effect has been to give stronger neighbours better access to South Sudan. Uganda’s producers, Kenyan traders, transporters, and service firms have been better placed to supply South Sudan than South Sudanese firms have been to compete regionally. A 2023 diagnostic found that South Sudan’s exports fell from $2.5 billion in 2013 to $793 million in 2020 and concluded that the country was diminishing as a regional competitive player. The EAC’s own development strategy says South Sudan still records intra-EAC trade below $200 million annually.
The economic argument against premature accession is cumulative and strong. South Sudan entered the EAC as one of the world’s most oil-dependent economies. Oil accounts for approximately 80 to 98 percent of government revenue and the overwhelming majority of export earnings. Manufacturing contributes roughly 2 percent of GDP. Agriculture, despite the country possessing 31.9 million hectares of arable land, accounts for only 6 percent of GDP because less than 5 percent of that land is cultivated.
This is not just underdevelopment. It is structural incapacity to compete as a producer in a regional market. The EAC Customs Union is built on the logic of comparative advantage: members specialise, produce, and trade. South Sudan has no functioning comparative advantage to offer the region beyond oil, an export that flows through Sudan’s pipeline to international markets, not into the EAC trading system.
This would be less troubling if South Sudan had the infrastructure and institutions to use openness as a springboard. It does not. The World Bank says only 2 percent of roads are paved and electricity reaches just 5 percent of households. Trade facilitation is among the weakest in the region. More than 90 percent of cargo from Uganda still transits a single main border corridor. The country’s own development and climate reporting describes a vicious cycle of fragility, conflict, and climate vulnerability. More than half the population is chronically food insecure. That is not a foundation for joining the big boys of a customs union. It is a warning that market exposure will be lopsided.
The agricultural side tells the same story. South Sudan has enormous land and agrifood potential. Yet the World Bank says domestic food needs exceed production by nearly 20 percent, and food imports averaged nearly 64 percent of total merchandise imports in 2020 to 2022. This matters because developmental integration is supposed to help countries move up the ladder of value addition, jobs, and enterprise formation. When a country instead enters mainly as a food importer, retail market, and oil exporter, the risk is that membership locks in dependence rather than accelerates transformation.
The EAC Customs Union, in this context, works against South Sudan’s developmental interests. It removes the ability to use tariff policy to protect nascent domestic industries. It exposes South Sudanese consumers to goods produced at scale in Kenya and Uganda, goods that South Sudanese enterprises cannot compete with. It locks South Sudan into an import-dependency relationship with more industrialised partners. The gains from integration accrue to Ugandan traders who supply Juba’s markets, Kenyan transporters moving goods on the Northern Corridor, and regional financial actors who hold South Sudan’s petrodollars. The losses accrue to the South Sudanese domestic economy, which has never been given the protected space to develop productive capacity.
This is not an argument against integration in principle. It is an argument about sequencing. Countries develop productive capacity first by investing in infrastructure, education, governance, and enterprise, and then open to regional competition from a position of relative strength. South Sudan was asked to open before it had built anything to open with.
The strongest genuine benefit South Sudan has derived from EAC membership is freedom of movement. South Sudanese can cross EAC borders without visas, work in neighbouring states, and access services unavailable at home. For individual families this is not a small thing. But freedom of movement without productive depth has a specific macro-economic character. It drains demand, talent, and entrepreneurial energy outward. South Sudanese who move to Uganda or Kenya spend in those economies. South Sudanese who flee as refugees are not exercising economic mobility. They are surviving a state failure.
One can overstate this. It is not possible to prove that EAC membership caused South Sudan’s weak performance. Civil war, corruption, oil shocks, flooding, and the conflict in Sudan did far more damage than any treaty ever could. That uncertainty matters. But it does not rescue the accession decision. The question is not whether the EAC caused South Sudan’s weakness. The question is whether the country had the institutional and productive depth to benefit from deep integration when it joined. The evidence says no.
The EAC now needs realism, not ritual
The costs have not fallen on South Sudan alone. The EAC has paid a price too. One cost is financial. The source material shows South Sudan owing between about $15 million and $26 million in unpaid contributions at different points, with around $15.1 million outstanding in one 2025 snapshot. That is not small for a bloc with a budget around $109 million. The wider arrears problem has left the secretariat underfunded, frozen recruitment, disrupted the East African Legislative Assembly, and contributed to a Court of Justice backlog reported at around 350 cases. South Sudan is not the only reason for that institutional strain. But South Sudan’s accession forms part of a broader pattern in which political enlargement has outrun institutional discipline.
The deeper cost is credibility. Rules that are not enforced do not build serious institutions. They hollow them out. The EAC has been reluctant to apply hard discipline to states that fail to meet obligations. The same hesitation has marked enlargement. South Sudan was admitted despite obvious governance and capacity deficits. Later admissions have raised similar questions. That sends a dangerous signal. It says standards are negotiable when politics demands it.
There is also a precedent cost. When the EAC admits a state that has never met its governance criteria, it signals to future applicants that the criteria are negotiable. This makes future enforcement harder and future enlargement decisions more politicised. A bloc that cannot say no has limited credibility as a rule-based community.
None of this means South Sudan should simply walk away. Withdrawal would sacrifice mobility gains, reduce diplomatic leverage, and remove a framework that still matters for future co-operation. But the status quo is not defensible either. South Sudan cannot meet the deepest obligations of membership on current capacity. The EAC cannot keep pretending otherwise.
The harder, better answer is renegotiated asymmetrical integration. South Sudan should remain politically inside the EAC. But the most demanding elements of the customs union and common market should be phased, slowed, or temporarily frozen under a formal benchmarked arrangement. This should be tied to measurable tests, not vague promises. Customs administration. Treaty domestication. Legal harmonisation. Standards enforcement. Trade facilitation. Roads. Electricity. Macroeconomic stability. Non-oil productive capacity.
In practice, that means a formal transitional protocol under which South Sudan receives time-bound derogations from the Customs Union, Common Market, and monetary convergence obligations, in exchange for binding, verifiable, phased domestic reforms. Those reforms should focus on the prerequisites that matter: customs automation and revenue administration, a functioning Rule of Origin system, judicial independence, anti-corruption enforcement, and infrastructure investment in trade-enabling corridors.
The EAC Treaty itself acknowledges the need for progressivity in services, labour, and capital provisions. What is needed now is not a treaty violation but a treaty-consistent acknowledgement that South Sudan requires a longer, structured preparatory period before it assumes full protocol obligations.
South Sudan is one of the most damaged countries on earth. It carries the legacy of half a century of civil war, colonial boundary-drawing and redrawing, systematic neglect, and post-independence conflict. Its people are resilient and its potential, agricultural land, mineral wealth, and a young population, is real. None of this is in question.
What is in question is whether admitting it into a regional trade bloc before it had the institutions, governance, infrastructure, and productive capacity to benefit from that membership was a sound decision. The evidence says it was not. South Sudan has been locked into the role of net consumer rather than competitive producer. The EAC’s credibility as a rule-based institution has been weakened.
Regional integration is one of Africa’s most important long-term projects. It deserves to be taken seriously. Taking it seriously means insisting that membership is earned, not gifted, that standards are enforced, not waived, and that the interests of citizens in South Sudan and across the region are served by getting the sequence right. South Sudan’s experience with the EAC also holds a lesson for African integration more broadly. Regional blocs are not ends in themselves. They are means to ends: economic transformation, stability, and prosperity.
South Sudan deserved better than premature admission. The EAC deserved better than a member that could not meet its obligations. Both sides are now living with the consequences. The remedy is realism: South Sudan is not ready for full regional integration, and the EAC is not enforcing its own rules. A negotiated path of asymmetrical implementation would acknowledge both facts while preserving the chance that South Sudan may yet grow into the membership it was granted too soon.
The writer, Dr. Remember Miamingi, is a South Sudanese expert in governance and human rights, as well as a political commentator. He can be contacted via email at remember.miamingi@gmail.com
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.