VP Hussein Abdelbagi Akol speak to the media in earlier press conference/Photo credit: Courtesy

The South Sudan Opposition Alliance welcomed the SPLM-IG roadmap on the implementation of the peace agreement, the Vice President for Service Cluster has said.

Two weeks ago, a team of four senior government officials submitted a roadmap to President Salva Kiir for completion of the remaining task in the 2018 peace deal.

The draft proposal, pending deliberation by the presidency, was reported to guide the country towards the end of the transitional period and pave the way for peaceful and credible elections.

Others include the implementation of the security arrangements and the expected graduation of more than 50,000 unified forces.

The proposed roadmap was criticized by some opposition parties saying it does not represent the views of the parties to the peace deal.

However, Vice President Hussein Abdel-Bagi says leaders of the South Sudan Opposition Alliance have expressed their views on the roadmap.

On this, he says SSOA views do not contradict the view of the committee that presented the roadmap to the President.

Hussein says the roadmap needs to include other people’s views.

“We thank the leaders of SSOA very much because they sat down and expressed their opinion that does not contradict the opinion of the committee that presented the road map to the president,” said VP Abdelbagi.

“There is no opinion to the contrary, so I thank the leadership of (SSOA) and the people who carried out the process and the contribution that the SSOA leadership made to the roadmap,

“We will support the roadmap and tell them you did a good job because it will bring peace, and we talked in our consultations that the roadmap needs to include other people.”

So far, the proposed roadmap has not been shared with the public.

Last week, the National Democratic Movement led by Dr. Lam Akol criticized the proposed submission of an election roadmap to the presidency as a monopoly of the transitional period by the ruling SPLM party.

NDM similarly regards the roadmap as an SPLM-IG document.