The fewer who are willing to manage the interactions of citizens the closer their only possible government comes to being a dictatorship

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The forum at Saving_South_Sudan welcomes your discussion and votes on the form of government that will guarantee peace, freedom, and prosperity to South Sudan. It invites you to help strategize how refugees can help make it happen.

It is said that Sudanese have to have peace before they can debate and ratify a better Constitution. The opposite is true: peace will be very unlikely as long as South Sudan's closest thing to a "constitution" nearly guarantees civil war.

Refugees can bring peace to South Sudan, but not before they reason together about a form of government able to correct the abuses of South Sudan's 2011 "constitution". As long as Sudan's only "constitution" gives as much power to the so-called "president" as to a dictator, civil war must be expected, making it nearly impossible for Sudanese in South Sudan to begin the process.

But refugees, living in peace and in communication with relatives in South Sudan, can begin the process. Through their communication they can begin building consensus about a better form of government, and through their economic power they can "manage" the war enough to allow Sudanese in South Sudan to finish the process and transfer power to their new government.

No leader of a nation whose Constitution gives him the power of a dictator can reasonably be expected to surrender decision-making to a population whose non-interest in the study required for decision-making was indicated by their ratification of a Constitution giving unrestrained authority to the "president".

There is no Constitution governing South Sudan, if by “Constitution” we mean a body of laws with the force to punish any leader who misuses power. No constitution, law, nor any government body, has any power to stop the President of South Sudan from doing anything he wants. The 2011 Constitution authorizes the president to dismiss all the rest of the government except himself: the Parliament, state governors, state assemblies, his cabinet, and the Vice President. So Salva Kiir's incredible self-restraint deserves credit - he has dismissed only his Vice President, Riek Machar, and two state governors. (See South Sudan's 2011 "constitution".)

The 2011 "constitution" fills 94 pages with 12,569 words. The Constitution proposed here, as of April, 2018, fills 14 pages with 7,610 words, not counting headings and links. (15,347 is the number of words in the "discussion" posted at Talk:Saving_South_Sudan not counting links or headlines, if you read all of that. This page is organized so that if you would like an explanation of any part of it, you can click a link to discussion of that part, and after you read it, click a link back to the point you left.) The U.S. Constitution, by comparison, fills 8 pages with 4,419 words. The shorter a Constitution is, the easier it will be for a majority of Sudanese to understand what they are approving. To the extent Sudanese are denied the opportunity to initially approve their form of government, and in the future to participate in it and amend it, they are not free.

To the extent Sudanese - or anyone - are given the opportunity, through reasoning with each other, to participate in the details of their own freedom - that is, to manage their interactions as citizens - but they do not because of laziness, apathy, church contempt for "politics", pride, or inability to get along with each other, their interactions must be managed by someone else. The fewer people in a nation willing to manage the interactions of citizens, the closer the only possible government for the nation comes to being a dictatorship.

What's hard is not the actual study. It's getting a majority of a population to care enough about freedom and peace to study and discuss the best way to secure it. It's getting a majority of a population to prefer loving, helping, and getting along with each other to fighting each other.

This problem isn't limited to Sudanese and Americans! When Moses was 40 he dropped his hint to his enslaved people that help was on the way, but they turned on him and drove him away. 40 years later God decided maybe they were tired enough of slavery for another try. But before the year was over, they refused to fight alongside God for their freedom, so God had them wait another 40 years. Have Sudanese waited long enough yet? May it be!