Why continued indifference to the highway militancy is sickening?
4 min readBy Martin Ariel Majak, Alexandria, Egypt
June 9, 2017 (SSB) — There’s no day that passes out without reports of an ambush and killing of innocent passengers on major highways linking Juba, the seat of the central government, to the outside world.
Known for notoriety are the Juba – Nimule, Juba – Yei and Juba -Bor highways that have become more of butcheries than roads for transit of goods and people.
Scores of people from specific background have been targeted due to their affiliations to one tribe on these roads and sadly many are likely to continue to die there if nothing is done to stop these killing spree. People joke that if you have given up your life, try to travel through one of those roads.
One thing that pisses me off is the government’s incoherent response to every attack carried out on these roads. Instead of taking preemptive measures like – having an armed presence along the highways- to ward off such attacks, they only dispatch soldiers after an every attack when lives are lost already and carnage exerted. And I always be like, why do they have to deploy soldiers after an attack? To do what? To recover the corpses and protect them from decomposition or vultures?
Many lives have been lost along these roads and nothing seems to concern the government. How many more people do they want killed for it to be a “big deal” to them? And to make it worse – if I have not mistaken – not even one government official has ever come out publicly to denounce such violence and does simple thing like spending out condolence messages to the bereaved families to comfort and console them.
They act as if they are complicit in the crime by just remaining muted. Since when did these guys in the government become so dumb and indifferent to the plight of the suffering “group of people”?
The cries of the bereaved families go loud after every attack but fall to the deaf ears of those in the government. Now when the government fails to provide security – it’s number one responsibility – to its citizens, it ceases to be called a government. Yes.
The indifference to the highway militancy is sickening. The government has got to draw up some plans to put an end to this one thing that never stops. If left to fester, like the way it is now, I think matters will turn for the worse. Such proactive measures are not so difficult to hatch and implement. I don’t why they fail to produce one.
They may say that they are giving time for the National Dialogue but highway militancy pre-dates the launch of the National Dialogue Initiative. It may only be that they might have got no clues on ways of tackling this challenge. And you know what, they don’t wish to say they are “clueless”.
Even the national dialogue initiative, much as it is intended for a good cause, stands no chance of achieving its aim. Why? Because of the guys behind the steering wheel. Pathetic.
He’s a student in Alexandria University. He can be reached via his email at arielmajak93@gmail.com or on Twitter as arielmajak.
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