Speech of President Kiir in Cairo, Egypt, after meeting President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi
January 11, 2017 (SSB) — President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, ladies and gentlemen. We have been in a brief meeting with His Excellency President Al Sisi to brief him about our situation is South Sudan. And before that, all of us when we come here from South Sudan, we come to our second home and this is how we find ourselves.
We are always here as citizens, and not as guests, and so we have a range of things that we have discussed with His Excellency for the implementation of the peace agreement, you know, there have been ups and downs since we signed the agreement in August 2015.
Dr. Machar never turned up again to go to Juba up to April 2015, and when he went to Juba, he made sure that he goes with the force, and that force was facilitated by people who are anti-peace, and pretend to be the peace makers.
Riek Machar went to Juba and he wanted to formed a parallel government where he will have his own cabinet outside the cabinet of the national government, this is how we have been working from April up to July.
When it came the day we were going to celebrate our anniversary of independence, that was the day he launched his attack on 8 July, just in the palace like this, this is where we fought, it was after that when he got lost, he fled from Juba up to Congo, from Congo, he was taken by the UN to Khartoum when, he improved, he went to South African for treatment.
After that he wanted to come back again, but he was rejected by the regional leaders, he was not accepted by Ethiopia, he was not accepted by Kenya, he was not accepted by Sudan, and so he went back to South Sudan Africa.
I want to inform you that there are people, the spoilers who are preventing the implementation of the peace agreement, as we speak here, they are holding a conference in Nairobi that the agreement has collapsed and they want the agreement to be renegotiated, they know what there are doing to South Sudanese so that they are diverted from the government not to listen to what government is doing.
I want to assure you that the agreement has not collapsed. The First Vice President Taban Deng Gai is working with me very closely, and we are implementing the agreement. They think that without Riek Machar, there is no agreement, but that’s not the way people work. You can sign an agreement and you get out of it, like what happened to us in South Sudan.
Dr. John, who was our leader during the war, signed the agreement, unfortunately, God took him after days, but the agreement didn’t collapse. President Bashir who signed the agreement and myself who was a deputy to John Garang, we implemented the agreement this is why now South Sudan became an independent, nobody wanted to destroy what has been done.
And so our visit to our country Egypt is in line with our relations that have been there all this time. This is where most of our cadres today got their education, and this is where we have more than 6,000 students in the higher institutions of education.
We are very thankful to our brothers and sisters in Egypt for all the support they have provided to us, we are also going to have so many other projects that are going to be carried out by the Arab Republic of Egypt in South Sudan. All these are capacity building processes and we will benefit from them.
So, I thank His Excellence President Al Sisi for his invitation to me to come and see him, so we talked about bilateral issues and important issues in the region, I thank him very much for his support to South Sudan during the meetings of the United Nations Security Council where some elements wanted to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan and agreed that you cripple the government and empower the rebels, because the rebels you cannot say that you will allow them to buy, but they know how to buy the guns.
So, if that’s done to the government, that means the government has been weakened, it will not defend the citizens, and will never have any capacity to fight back the rebels, we don’t want to fight anyway, we want peace in our country so that we develop our country. So all those who have been standing with South Sudan to prevent these things, we thank them all and God bless them.
Thank you very much Your Excellency.
The opinion expressed here is solely the view of the writer. The veracity of any claim made are the responsibility of the author, not PaanLuel Wël: South Sudanese Bloggers (SSB) website. If you want to submit an opinion article or news analysis, please email it to paanluel2011@gmail.com. SSB do reserve the right to edit material before publication. Please include your full name, email address, city and the country you are writing from.
About Post Author
