Profile: Quiet man in a cowboy hat carries a nation's hopes

Published on Monday 7 February 2011 15:37

Many people feel South Sudan's best hopes of a peaceful birth lie in the consensus-building skills of its unassuming leader, Salva Kiir.

The former army intelligence officer is already a hero to most southerners for guiding them to January's independence referendum, which saw a vote to secede from the north after years of civil war.

Mr Kiir, inset right, now has to take the oil-producing, but desperately underdeveloped, territory further to full independent statehood.

His first challenge will be to get through the next five months of negotiations with his old enemies in the north over volatile issues, including division of oil revenues in the build-up to 9 July.

Mr Kiir's imposing appearance, towering over most other politicians and sporting his trademark cowboy hat, masks an understated political operator who favours cautious consensus-building over confrontation.

When Mr Kiir first stepped up as the leader of the semi-autonomous south in 2005, many compared him unfavourably with his firebrand predecessor, the civil war hero John Garang.

His quiet approach and lack of polarising rhetoric could now be his main strengths in governing a landlocked territory handicapped by tribal divisions, severe poverty, unstable neighbours and huge supplies of privately held weapons.

"With Garang it was a revolution," said International Crisis Group analyst Fouad Hikmat. "But now is the time to listen to others, rather than imposing decisions."

Mr Garang led the Sudan People's Liberation Movement for more than two decades, fighting for a "New Sudan", with equal rights for all of Sudan's peripheries.

He died in a helicopter accident in 2005.

Mr Kiir has concentrated on keeping his fragmented region united.

"He did survive the whole of the war … He's got some political skills there," said Roger Middleton, from London's Chatham House think-tank.