Yei County, Central Equatoria State

DEMOGRAPHY

2008 NBS Census population: 201,443
2021 NBS PES population estimate*: 181,841
2022 UN OCHA population estimate*: 302,763

Ethnic groups: Kakwa, Bari, Mundu, Avok’aya/Avukaya, Makaraka/Aido, Pajulu, Baka

Displacement Figures Q3 2022: 14,818 IDPs (-52,693 Q1 2020) and 83,844 returnees (+73,747 Q1, 2020).

IPC Food Security: November 2022 – Crisis (Phase 3); IPC Projections: December to March 2023 – Crisis (Phase 3); April to July 2023 – Crisis (Phase 3)

ECONOMY & LIVELIHOODS

Yei County is located in Central Equatoria State. It borders Lainya County to the east, Morobo County to the south, and Western Equatoria State (Maridi and Mundri West counties) to the north. It has a long border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west. The county is characterised by hills and high levels of tree cover. Various rivers – including the River Yei – flow northwards in the western and eastern parts of the county.

According to FEWSNET (2018), the county falls within the equatorial maize and cassava livelihoods zone. A 2018 report by FAO and WFP estimated that 30% of households in the county were farmers (p.19). Following the 2016 outbreak of conflict, Yei County experienced one of the largest drops in harvested areas in the country. The county transitioned from harvesting a surplus of cereals to a deficit following the outbreak of conflict. Due to Yei County’s proximity to international borders, it serves as a significant hub for South Sudan’s trade routes. Prior to the outbreak of conflict 2016, a number of small businesses were thriving, particularly in the Yei town area. Additionally, the soil and climate of Yei County made it an ideal location for agricultural activities. The presence of the Yei River also allows for residents to pursue fishery as a livelihood, although this depends on access, which has been impacted by extended periods of insecurity in the area. The Lantoto National Park is located in the west of the county although precise boundaries are not demarcated, and illegal poaching has been a persistent problem worsened by insecurity.

In November 2022, IPC projections put Yei County as being at crisis (IPC level 3) levels of food insecurity in November 2022, with conditions projected to persist at the same level until at least mid-2023. An estimated 43% of households in the county engaged in farming, with a gross cereal yield of 1.75 tonnes per hectare in 2021 (FAO/WFP 2022), increasing to 1.8 tonnes per hectare in 2022 (FAO/WFP 2023).

INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVICES

The county’s headquarters is located in Yei Town Payam. Yei County is located along South Sudan’s southern border, linking it to trade routes through Uganda as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo. Following independence, Yei County was seen as a stable area with comparably significant development in terms of government institutions, educational facilities and healthcare. However, these have all been significantly impacted by sustained insecurity in the area as well as neighbouring counties, and insecurity along the Juba-Yei road has impacted trade routes that supported the economy. When Yei became difficult and dangerous to access during heightened periods of conflict, humanitarian organizations and residents resorted to accessing the area by air. The associated displacement dynamics has contributed to drastic reorganization of land occupation and governance in the county, such that the politics of land-control and identity will continue to pose a challenge to stable community relations for the foreseeable future (Justin 2016).

Prior to the outbreak of conflict in 2013, Yei’s infrastructure was slowly being developed, with electricity being provided sporadically through the private sector (NRECA n.d.). However, the conflict has inhibited further investment. While not as affected by flooding as many parts of South Sudan in recent years, extreme weather has proved an obstacle to residents of Yei. In November 2021, high winds and thunderstorms affected the central market with the roofs of permanent buildings blown off and other structures collapsing. Millions of SSP-worth of goods were destroyed and at least ten buildings were left without roofs.

Yei County is home to twenty-nine (29) Early Childhood Development Centres, sixty-four (64) Primary schools, and eight (8) Secondary schools. Seven of the secondary schools are located within Yei Town Payam with the remaining school, Emmanuel Christian Academy, located in Tore Payam. Yei is the site of Yei Teacher Training College, one of just a few such institutions of its kind in South Sudan.

Yei County was reported to have forty-two (42) health facilities, all of which were reported to be functional.  Among them are thirty-three (33) PHCUs, eight (8) PHCCs and one (1) hospital in 2022. This means that there were an estimated 1.59 PHCUs per 15,000 people and 1.16 PHCCs per 50,000 people according to the WHO. Yei Civil Hospital was reported to be moderately functional.

According to OCHA’s Humanitarian Needs Overview for 2023, there are approximately 275,100 people with humanitarian needs in the county (up from 212,900 in 2021), nearly 110,000 of whom are IDPs or returnees. This is equivalent to approximately 90% of the estimated population reported in the HNO. In 2021, OCHA identified Yei as a county with one of the highest levels of contamination of landmines/explosive remnants of war.

CONFLICT DYNAMICS

Yei has been the site of both historically complex relationships between the SPLM/A and the Kakwa community – the largest ethnic group in the county – and the area in which a number of significant internal SPLM/A developments have gathered pace. Yei had been heavily defended by the SAF during the second Sudanese civil war, in part because of its commercial value as a key transit point for smuggled goods from the Democratic Republic of Congo (including narcotics) to northern Sudan, and as a source of agricultural produce and timber from the surrounding area (Madut-Arop 2006, p.313). However, the SPLM/A succeeded – with significant support from Ethiopia and Uganda – in permanently capturing Yei in March 1997 and soon afterwards reconstituted the SPLM/A headquarters in the town amid insecurity in the movement’s Eastern Equatoria strongholds. In the 1990s, reports of alleged abuses by SPLM/A forces in the Yei area were counterposed by efforts at developing civilian administrative structures. These nascent structures represented an effort at civilianising a generally militarised movement, and at improving relations with Equatorian communities. Equatorian administrators in these new structures engaged in continued efforts to curb the power of the military wing (Leonardi 2013, pp.175-177).

Following the SPLM/A capture of Yei, insecurity in the area continued in the form of the Lord’s Resistance Army activity during the early 2000s (Schomerus 2012). Multiple areas of Yei County were particularly affected by the activities of deserting SPLM/A soldiers in late 2002 (Anonymous 2002, p.8), and the county also hosted emergency talks later that year and a peace and reconciliation conference in Tore Payam in April 2003. These events are discussed further in the profile for Torit County. Meanwhile, disputes over land (including in Mugwo and Otogo payams) and administrative positions increased in the wake of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, whilst in late 2012 an inter-ethnic land dispute in the Giru area (north-east of Yei town) revived fraught civil-military relations in the county (Justin 2020, pp.118-122). The leasing of agricultural land has also been linked to land disputes in the county, while tensions relating to historical population movement, displacement, and return have also been associated with intermittent conflict (Van Leeuwen et al. 2018, p.293; Justin and van Dijk 2017, pp.12-18).

Although Yei County was comparably unscathed following the outbreak of conflict in December 2013, the area increasingly became an epicentre in the expanded national conflict since the signing of the ARCSS in 2015. Perceptions that the Equatorian bloc had largely been excluded from the agreement contributed to some Equatorian elites aligning themselves to the SPLA-IO (ICG 2021). The SPLA-IO were also alleged to have exploited the cantonment process of the ARCSS (including in Greater Equatoria), which enabled them to engage in recruitment drives under the guise of demobilising and integrating their forces. In April 2016, in a move which ratcheted up local tensions the government reinforced the strategic garrison town of Yei with poorly trained recruits, mainly from the Dinka ethnic group, who were pejoratively referred to as Mathiang Anyoor** (HRW 2016; ICG 2021). When the capital erupted in violence on 7 July 2016, Machar fled to the Congolese border via Lainya, with his predominantly Nuer forces linking up with Equatorian commanders and new Equatorian recruits en route. Following intermittent violence and ambushes over the preceding months, serious fighting broke out in Yei County on 13 July 2016, when opposition forces attacked a military convoy in Mitika, killing 17 SPLA soldiers and reportedly sparking a series of reprisal attacks against the local community (UNMISS/OHCHR 2017, p.13).

As insurgency spread in rural areas in the county, counter-insurgency activity resulted in numerous abuses against the local population and drove mass displacement, particularly during the second half of 2016 and the first half of 2017. The UN counted roughly 10,000 destroyed structures in the vicinity of Yei, and along its major exit roads (UNITAR 2017). The OHCHR reported it had found reasonable grounds to believe that government forces engaged in serious human rights violations in Central Equatoria including killings, rape, arbitrary detentions, torture, destruction of civilian property and looting in Lainya, Yei, and Kajo Keji counties between 11 July 2016 and December 2017 (OHCHR 2018). As with violence in adjoining areas of the state – and mirroring historical conflict in the Yei area – the conflict in Yei quickly assumed an economic dimension as well as an ethnic inflection (notably between the Dinka and various Equatorian communities). Alongside alleged abuses by government forces, opposition forces attacked reportedly attacked Dinka civilians (some of whom had long resided in Yei) (HRW 2016; UNMISS/OHCHR 2017). Concurrently, conflict between these groups in Yei has been both sustained and complicated by competition over natural resources, including gold and timber (UNMISS 2019).

The formation of the National Salvation Front (NAS) in March 2017 resulted in a number of defections from Equatorian commanders from the SPLA-IO to NAS and increased factional discord among opposition forces in the Yei area (UNMISS 2019, p.4). Violence between the SPLA-IO and government increased in Yei in the weeks following the signing of the R-ARCSS in September 2018 (UNSC 2018), though soon gave way to joint operations by the two forces against NAS across southern areas of Central Equatoria. These operations resulted in increased NAS ambushes and operations, amid renewed counter-insurgency (UN Panel of Experts 2020, p.15). Being a strategic hub, the roads connecting Yei to surrounding areas have repeatedly been targeted by all forces with various checkpoints and intimidation tactics used. While NAS were dislodged from many of their bases following sustained offensives against their positions, the group adopted a more mobile footprint, though were alleged to have forced local populations to provide material support whilst engaging in illicit cross-border trade (UNMISS 2019, pp.17-18). Intermittent clashes between the SSPDF and NAS continued in July and November of 2022, and in June and September 2023.

While relations between established communities in Yei have been largely peaceful in recent years, periodic tensions and livestock theft have in 2022 and 2023. These have typically involved pastoralists from parts of the Mundari and Dinka Bor communities, although have been on a smaller scale when compared to tensions involving pastoralists in the nearby counties of Lainya and Kajo-Keji. However, a clash occurred between elements of the Kakwa and Mundari communities in February 2023 following an alleged theft of livestock. The clash did not result in any deaths, though several injuries were reported. Additionally, tensions have recently been reported in parts of the Kakwa community of Yei in the wake of the killing of the Executive Chief of Ombasi Boma in September 2023 in unclear circumstances (UNSC 2023, p.5).

ADMINISTRATION & LOGISTICS

Payams: Yei Town (County Headquarters), Lasu, Mugwo, Otogo, Tore

 UN OCHA 2020 map of Terekeka County: https://reliefweb.int/map/south-sudan/south-sudan-yei-county-reference-map-march-2020

Roads: There are three primary roads and two secondary roads running from Yei town.

• North-east to Lainya and Juba – The primary road was fully passable in the dry season of 2023. However, road conditions deteriorate during the rainy season, with the Yei-Lainya section of the road impassible during the 2022 rainy reason, and the Lainya-Juba stretch of the road deemed “Passable with difficulties”.
• South to Morobo County – there is both a primary and tertiary road to Morobo town with conditions unknown for the rainy season of 2022 and dry season of 2023. The primary road also runs to Kaya town on the border with Uganda, again with unknown conditions.
• North-west to Maridi County – there is a primary road with unknown conditions during both the rainy and the dry season of 2022 and 2023, respectively.
• East to Kajo-Keji County – there is a secondary road with conditions unknown during both the rainy and the dry season of 2022 and 2023, respectively. A secondary road runs southwest from Yei to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, however seasonal conditions are unknown.

UNHAS-recognised Heli and Fixed-Wing Airplane Airstrips: Yei Airport

REFERENCES

Anonymous. (2002). Confidential Report on the Emergency Consultative Meeting for Equatoria – On the Impact Created by Particular Groups of Army Deserters in September, 2002. Retrieved via Sudan Open Archive 14 March 2024.

Boswell, A. (2019). Insecure Power and Violence: The Rise and Fall of Paul Malong and the Mathiang Anyoor. Retrieved 18 July 2023.

HRW. (2016). South Sudan: New Abuse of Civilians by Both Sides. Retrieved 17 October 2023.

ICG (2021). South Sudan’s Other War: Resolving the Insurgency in Equatoria. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Justin, P.H. (2020). State-building and Land Conflict in South Sudan. Doctoral thesis, Wageningen University. Retrieved 16 October 2023.

Leonardi, C. (2013). Dealing with Government in South Sudan: Histories of Chiefship, Community and State. Oxford: James Currey.

Madut-Arop, A. (2006). Sudan’s Painful Road to Peace: A Full Story of the Founding and Development of SPLM/SPLA. Booksurge Publishing.

NRECA. (n.d.). Yei Electric Cooperative, South Sudan. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

OHCHR. (2018). Report of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Schomerus, M. (2012). “‘They forget what they came for’’: Uganda’s army in Sudan. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 6(1), 124-153. Retrieved 14 July 2023.

UNITAR. (2017). Damage Density Map, Nahr Yei District, South Sudan. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

UNMISS/OHCHR. (2017). Human Rights Violations and Abuses in Yei, July 2016 – January 2017. Retrieved 17 October 2023.

UNMISS. (2019). Conflict-related violations and abuses in Central Equatoria: September 2018—April 2019. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

UN Panel of Experts. (2020). Interim report of the Panel of Experts on South Sudan submitted pursuant to resolution 2521 (2020). Retrieved 17 October 2023.

UNSC. (2018). Report of the Secretary-General on South Sudan (covering the period from 2 September to 30 November 2018), S/2018/1103. Retrieved 17 October 2023.

UNSC. (2023). Situation in South Sudan: Report of the Secretary-General, S/2023/976. Retrieved 12 January 2024.

Young, J. (2012). The Fate of Sudan: The Origin and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process. London: Zed Books.

REPORTS on YEI

Boswell, A. (2021). Conflict and Crisis in South Sudan’s Equatoria. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

de Jong, M. (2012). Handling land conflict in Yei, South Sudan. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Deng, D.K. (2019). Housing, Land and Property Disputes in South Sudan: Findings from a survey Nimule, Torit, Wau and Yei. South Sudan Law Society. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Global Rights Compliance. (2022). No Choice but to Flee: Starvation and Displacement in Central Equatoria, South Sudan. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

IOM. (2013). Village Assessment Survey: County Atlas. Retrieved 21 July 2023.

Justin, P.H. & van Dijk, H. (2017). Land Reform and Conflict in South Sudan: Evidence from Yei River County. Africa Spectrum 52(2) p.3-28. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Justin, P. H., & Van Leeuwen, M. (2016). The politics of displacement-related land conflict in Yei River County, South Sudan. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 54(3), 419-442. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Justin, P. H., & Verkoren, W. (2021). Hybrid governance in South Sudan: the negotiated state in practice. Peacebuilding, 1-20. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Martin, E. and Sluga, N. (2011). Sanctuary in the city? Urban displacement and vulnerability in Yei, South Sudan. Humanitarian Policy Group. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

UNMISS. (2017). Human Rights Violations and Abuses in Yei County, July 2016 – January 2017. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

Van Leeuwen, M., Van de Kerkhof, M., & Van Leynseele, Y. (2018). Transforming land governance and strengthening the state in South Sudan. African Affairs, 117 (467), 286-309. Retrieved 13 July 2023.

* Note: The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Population Estimation Survey (PES) was published in April 2023 based on data collected in May-June 2021. This uses a different method to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Population Working Group (PWG) figures produced based on a combination of 2008 census data and population movement data up to 2022. The large discrepancies are primarily attributable to these different methods rather than changes in the actual population numbers over time and have been disputed by some civil society and analysts. Although the later PWG figures were produced more recently for the HNO 2023, at the request of the Government of South Sudan the data and method used by the PES is being used as the basis for the Common Operational Dataset (COD) for the UN system for the HNO 2024 and likely beyond. For further detail on this and other sources used in the county profiles, see the accompanying Methodological Note.

** Note: The name ‘Mathiang Anyoor’ has been used in a variety of ways, some of which have conflict sensitivity implications. Initially referring to a paramilitary force established in 2012 in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal State, and which primarily comprised Dinka (and some Luo) recruits, desertions and heavy losses incurred by the force during the early stages of the national conflict led to further rounds of recruitment from Warrap and Northern Bahr el-Ghazal states in 2014 and 2015, which occurred alongside SPLA recruitment (including from predominantly Dinka areas). The term was also increasingly deployed pejoratively to refer to Dinka SPLA/SSPDF soldiers during the second half of the national conflict (2013-2018) by opposition groups, as the conflict intensified in Greater Equatoria. In Yei County, it is likely that the term ‘Mathiang Anyoor’ was used to connote the presence of new Dinka SPLA soldiers who had been dispatched to the area in 2016, rather than to forces connections to the paramilitary force of the same name (ICG 2021, p.7). See Boswell (2019) for further information.