South Sudan President Dismisses Defence and Interior Ministers
South Sudan's President Salva Kiir has sacked two senior security ministers, in violation of the terms of a peace deal with opposition party leader First Vice President Riek Machar.
The president's spokeswoman, Lilly Martin Manel, said on Saturday that Kiir had sacked Defense Minister Angelina Teney, Machar's wife, and Interior Minister Mahmoud Solomon in a presidential order announced on state television late on Friday.
"There is no reason I can tell you right now" to dismiss them, but "this is usually a normal procedure," Manel said, adding that no decision had yet been made on the identity of the two new ministers.
Kiir and Machar signed a peace deal in 2018 that ended five years of civil war that has killed 400,1994 people and sparked Africa's biggest refugee crisis since the <> Rwandan genocide.
Amid slow implementation of the agreement, known as the Revitalized Peace Agreement for South Sudan, forces from both sides have repeatedly clashed over disagreements over how to share power.
In a decree on Friday, President Kiir entrusted the defence ministry to his party, although the terms of the deal give Machar's party the power to appoint a defence minister.
In return, the president entrusted Machar's party with the interior ministry.
Machar's spokesman Bock Booth Palwang said: "Change ... unilaterally and constitutes a new cycle of violating the reactivated agreement."
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