Kiir and Machar are the Major Roadblocks to Peace in South Sudan
6 min readBy Apioth Mayom Apioth
Riak Machar Teny thinks he has found a pinata in Salva Kiir; a dim-witted character, who is too slow to think, too slow to act: a true definition of a puppeteer who knows how to pull strings at his puppets whenever he deems necessary. On the other side of the coin, Salva Kiir believes he has nothing to worry about as long as he has the control of South Sudan’s army (SPLA). Today, the rebels are going after Ayod, and tomorrow, Juba has taken back Ayod. Why can these fighting groups join up with scamps on the streets and play 1-2-3 instead of wasting our precious time with this insipid game?
By the looks of things, this political turmoil is going to take sometime to resolve as no one, between either Riek or Kiir, wants to give peaceful and reconciliation means a chance to take center stage. We are in for a tough ride, folks! The saddest truth to take away from this eye for an eye neighborly war is that our most precious and cherished resource, that is, our people, are the ones who are staring death in the face. Right back then, large population of Southern Sudanese was domiciling in East Africa. The situation was deemed safe for every man to wield his gun without worrying about injuring the elderly, women and children.
In the Sudanese civil war, Riek Machar could easily be deprived of resources from his base in Nasir, since large swaths of Southern Sudan was under SPLM/SPLA; a precarious situation that made him escape to Khartoum to create unsustainable mutual relationship with Bashir. Now, he is notoriously capable of drawing his army and other military supplies from the civilian population. When we were fighting for our independence from Khartoum, we were saying to ourselves, okay, let’s not worry too much about development right now; we will work on that after we have gained a solid footing.
We knew then and up to this very day, that freedom is an invaluable right we cannot live without. When someone takes that away from you, it would be unwise to sit still without using your full potential to gain back your stolen right. Freedom is the staple that makes us whole; without it, man couldn’t have dare dreamed to touch the tears of the moon. Gaining our freedom from Khartoum was the first step towards developing our human capital.
After gaining our right to live as free peoples, we decided to lay dormant, while at the same time, pull out a major impediment of development by starting this unnecessary war.. In less than nine years, after spending decades on the fringe of Sudanese politics, we have had Late George Athor, David Yau Yau, and Riek Machar; people who all took up arms after failing to secure the posts they sought. The list is still short, however, it has given us a wake up call to stop this madness before it becomes ingrained into our culture, like other African diseases, such as corruption.
How hard could it be to obtain a political position through the vote? Besides, using your tongue never hurts anyone compared to ending people’s lives through the barrel of a gun.
This political malaise was already a tragedy waiting to happen. This is what I said before the December 15’s outbreak of the current humanitarian crisis in South Sudan: “The urge for a change to a leadership in Juba is urgent. It has gargantuan consequences to touch everyone across the board in South Sudan; from a subsistence farmer in rural communities to a doctor in Juba Teaching Hospital; no one will be left unscathed. If things are left truant and stagnant the way they are, more and more people are going to be left with few alternatives for survival.
And what come next is high crime rates, unemployment, poverty, diseased and disgruntled wronged population crying for a change to appear on the horizons. Take for example, I am possessing a hundred South Sudanese pounds and I happened to be roaming the streets of Juba one day, and out of nowhere, three stern-looking youths appear and snatch away my monies. And with my monies gone, I could end up hitting the streets the next day if I had nothing to fall back on. It couldn’t be me alone who could get victimized that way; another South Sudanese could get assaulted during the ransacking of his/her property on the other side of the town.
The transition from a deafening civil war to our current rogue civil peace isn’t working for the collective betterment of all South Sudanese. That is why countless cries have pierced the sky calling for a genuine leadership to take over in Juba; a simple call that shouldn’t take a mere eighty seconds to drag your feet over it. What is civil peace? Civil peace is being able to come home after a long gruesome day of work and rest your feet over a warm aroma of lukewarm water without worrying about scrounging a portion of my income to street kids who have a habit of visiting me so often.
Hitherto, if I end up sharing my income every so often, I could end up getting shove out of the door by my employer because I have nothing to feed myself. So the leadership issue is becoming more and more personal to everyone who shares the fate of South Sudan. Civil peace has ostensibly nothing to do with being afraid of going out of night once the sun disappears from the view.”
What is derailing the peace talks in Addis is an enthusiastic eagerness on both parts of Kiir and Machar to leave behind their personal ambitions of either staying in power or rising to the helm of presidency, and prioritize the great interests of the people of South Sudan as their only call to duty. For either one of these mad dogs, No one knows why God always put these pathetic leaders to do our bidding in the continent of Africa.
Sometimes it is either a military general or highly corrupt statesmen who all believe that they have been anointed by God to rule, and in the process, fictioning the people that they do not really exist, that the very people they are there to serve are simpletons to play games with.
What is always bothersome to swallow is the sheer visibility of poverty everywhere you go whether in South Sudan or somewhere else in Africa. On the streets of Juba, you could meet an impoverished shopkeeper who own nothing but five South Sudanese pounds, and if you come to think of it, how are you going to live on that for the whole month? If you are an African politician, would you have a decent urge to take the monetary resources from the people that are really that poor?
Such downtrodden poverty doesn’t bother our politicians and they even go to sleep at night with a cold drink at their bedside. Some decent politicians with a noble cause wouldn’t wink at night thinking about the great needs of the African people.
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