SPLM Sent 20 Cadres To China For Training

This article was last updated on May 27, 2022

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The South Sudan People’s Liberation Moment (SPLM) said it is sending 20 party members to China for training to boost party leadership administrative capacity.

SPLM Acting Secretary General, Dr. Ann Itto, told reporters in SPLM House in Juba that the party members will be traveling tomorrow (today, Tuesday) and start the training on November 12 and return to Juba on November 23, 2014.

“This is the sixth batch with a total of 150 since training started in 2011, but for this year this is the second batch with 20 people.

“Last month I led a delegation of 20 at the invitation of the Communist Party of China (CPC) for a ten days visit. That delegation was back on October 26 and this is now the second delegation of 20 that will be led by Comrade Daniel Awet Akot, who is also a member of the SPLM Political Bureau.

“This training that we have held with the CPC is a result of a Memorandum of Understanding, which SPLM and CPC signed in 2011 to ran for four years with this year ending. The MoU is strictly about building apragmatic relationship between SPLM and CPC and also between South Sudan and China. It focuses on exchange visits and training. 

“It also includes sharing of views about international and national issues such as economic, social andcultural issues,” said Itto

Dr. Itto added that the MoU also focuses on investment, citing on-going Juba International Airportconstruction amongst others.

The SPLM Acting S.G said that the training focuses on sharing ideas, based on the ideas of the CPC, on how a political party can have leadership and how to build a leader who can support its members and general public.

“This group was selected jointly between SPLM and CPC and we hope that the ten days experience will help our leaders who are going there to learn about experiences the CPC went through,” she said.

“All successful political parties share experiences for lessons learned. We have already been to National Resistance Movement (NRM) of Uganda in June this year because they also started as liberation moment, they have become a ruling party, they have more experience than us; so we want to know how they have been able to package the ideology of liberation into party programs that have remained relevant to the needs of the people,” she explained.

“SPLM also visited the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which is also a liberation moment. From them we also wanted to learn how RPF have managed to deal with the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide, uniting their people and making them productive.”

Regarding CPC, Itto said, “What we see in China is a political party which started because they had problems in their country. They want to defeat feudalism, they were also colonized, and they also had wars.”

She explained that CPC was born in 1923 with the objective of making the lives of the Chinese people better and that over the last seven years they have remained the ruling party; but they were also to transform the lives of people of China. Today China is the second largest economy in the world, very far from what people of China expected were capable of achieving. So we are not going there to become communist but to look at the experiences of the CPC, how they managed to keep the party together with people.

“Once we get that we also compare with the lessons we leant from other people and also consider our realities in South Sudan. We use the knowledge; the idea is to help us come up with experiences and skills which will make us unite the SPLM, make it stronger and build the lives of our people. Not that we want to become anybody else”

“We are doing this because there is a lot of effort going on to bring peace through IGAD. Last month, through the good will of another revolutionary, the CCM of Tanzania, we had all the leaders going to Arusha, Tanzania, to learn from their experiences. Out of that came the framework agreement on the way forward for resolving the conflict within the SPLM.

“We want to rejuvenate SPLM, we want to understand where we went wrong and we want to be able to correct it in the interest of people,” said Itto

The Acting SG concluded: “We have to accepted that we made a mistake as humans and that We cannot change the fast but we can change the future and therefore we focuses on addressing the issue so that we have a better future. We have to accept that something somewhere went wrong and we are responsible. Now time has come to move forward by addressing those factors that have been responsible for causing the differences.”