This paper discusses the institutional and organizational characteristics of the state administration in Southern Sudan and its relationship with the foreign non-governmental aid organisations in the period between the Addis Ababa peace agreement in 1972 and the collapse of the administrative structure in the middle of the 1980s. It focuses on two different but interrelated phenomena. Firstly, an empirical description and analysis of the state and structure of the public bureaucracy and its characteristics and strength in the Southern Sudan will be presented. Secondly, an analysis of the role of the NGO-sector will be presented. This effort at understanding the role and policies of the foreign NGOs in relation to the development of the state administration’s is an implicit comment on a dominating conceptualisation of the dynamics of NGO-government relations in Africa: that the NGO-sector plays an important role in the democratisation of African countries by strengthening and pluralising a civil society conceived as threatened by an overdeveloped, bureaucratic and parasitic state administration.