South Sudan's oil cutoff: brilliant negotiating, or suicide?

The current stand off between Sudan and a newly independent South Sudan made me recall an anecdote told by Henry Kissinger, after a series of negotiations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's father, the late President Hafez al-Assad.

“Assad never lost his aplomb. He negotiated daringly and tenaciously like a riverboat gambler to make sure that he exacted the last sliver of available concessions. I once told him that I had seen negotiators who deliberately moved themselves to the edge of a precipice to show that they had no further margin of maneuver. I had even known negotiators who put one foot over the edge, in effect threatening their own suicide. He was the only one who would actually jump off the precipice, hoping that on his way down he could break his fall by grabbing a tree he knew to be there. Assad beamed.”

I will leave it to you to calculate who might be Hafez: South Sudan's President Salva Kiir or Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir? Or both?

South Sudan's top negotiator, Pagan Amum told reporters in Addis Ababa Saturday: "Tomorrow the [oil] shutdown will be complete and what will be remaining to be done the day after is finishing the cleaning and flushing of facilities." South Sudan is shutting down its oil production, last put by officials at 350,000 barrels per day in November. Approximately 99 percent of the new state's income is from the sale of oil. 

Earlier in the week, South Sudan's Information Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin announced that South Sudan and Kenya had signed a memorandum of understanding to build an oil pipeline to the Kenyan port of Lamu. Construction of the pipeline will begin “as soon as sources of funding are made available,” which should take about a month, he said.

Minister Benjamin is reckoning that the pipeline could be completed in 10 months. That's a bullish call. The biggest problem is surely the sky-high risk of asymmetric guerrilla-type sabotage. I would think it's highly likely. Therefore, insurance for the pipeline might well prove punitive. However, the point remains that we in Kenya have an embedded geopolitical advantage in this region, that being the route to the sea. It is like the jugular vein for many of our East African neighbors.

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