And the SPLM Internal Squabbling Continues…….
3 min readBy PaanLuel Wel.
These are two great articles insofar as the word-war is concerned within the SPLM.
1. Machar hints party may act against S. Sudan’s Kiir over repeated violations
2. South Sudan’s Amum, Machar accused of “deliberately” causing SPLM failures
But we must commend Dr. Riek Machar for choosing this path to fight for ‘his right’ to rule South Sudan rather than resorting to ethnic mobilization and incitement as many had presupposed.
All South Sudanese–including Riek, Pagan and Nyandeng who have so far declared their interests–have an inalienable right to run for the highest office in the land, be it the party chairmanship or the presidential office. It is their rights, period! Anyone making a crime out of it is not only doing a disservice to the nation but is actually fooling the President.
But only under one condition: you can’t criticize a system that you are part of and still enjoys its largesse. Either you resign first and then criticize or just shut up and “eat” in silence. You can’t have you cake and still eat it. This is where Riek, Pagan and Nyandeng have gone wrong.
But surely, they are all bad boyz–Kiir, Riek, Pagan, Nyandeng–in term of leadership. They have collectively mismanaged the country, have collectively failed our historic party–the SPLM–reducing it to a shell of its former self.
The saddest part is not that they haven’t met people’s expectations–their failures, it is that they are holding us hostage to their whims: no matter how fed up we are with them, we have no viable alternative leader other than these tested guys.
Riek, Pagan and Nyandeng might be pretending that the ills bedeviling the country/party are of Salva Kiir’s own making, but that is a white lie. It is not Kiir that is the problem though he is part and parcel of it, the problem is systemic.
You can get rid of Kiir, of Riek, of Pagan of Nyandeng etc., but the problem would still manifest itself in the various ways it has been. And neither would the election of Riek/Pagan/Nyandeng bring any panacea to our national headache.
It would simply be “our turn to eat” pandemonium as the cronyists of Riek/Pagan/Nyandeng–who are waiting patiently for the prey–would scramble to surpass the cronyists of Benydit Kiir!
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