The Futility of Crafting a Transitional Gov’t without Salva Kiir and Riek Machar
4 min readHowling in the Wind: The Futility of Establishing a Transitional Government of National Unity (TGONU) without the participation of President Salva Kiir and Dr Riek Machar
By Mawan Mourtat, London, UK
Sunday, May 6, 2018 (PW) — Many people, including myself, believe that we need Kiir and Riek to be around and involved if we are going to get sustainable peace. In fact, we need the FDs too.
There are two very simple reasons for this. First, these people have their supporters and, these supporters are not going to vanish just because their leaders have been forced out. If the belligerents could be made to reconcile, their supporters will follow them and our people could be united again.
The second reason is this. These leaders will never wilfully give up. They have resorted to violence, presided over the death of more than 50,000 South Sudanese, destroyed our cities and shown no qualms that our country’s sovereignty and its hard-earned independence are jeopardised. Threatened to sell us to the Arab League or the United Nations. Their insatiable apatite for power is unparalleled.
Those are the two reasons why it is unfruitful to demand that Kiir and Riek should leave before peace could be attained. In pursuing this path, its advocates are blinded to the facts that, they could entrench the disunity of our people, and that their demands are untenable. They are untenable because, neither Kiir nor Riek or the FDs are willing to leave the South Sudanese political scene. Our country is being held to ransom. Unless people are themselves willing to resort to violence to oust these leaders, they should stop pushing for this and begin to think constructively.So as it has been since December 2013, we the ordinary people of this great nation are powerless and can do nothing other than to push for peace and reconciliation among our leaders.
Hopes for a speedy breakthrough in the peace process, however, are as rock bottom as they have always been. At the Addis talks, the opposition demands have grown even bolder. During this weekend’s SPLM Conversion, the opposition has voted with their feet and Kiir seems to have ended up negotiating with himself.
Hope seems to be fading, but it is at such desperate moments that human beings must rise up, stare the devil in the eyes and say: “leave our land Satan!”. There is no room for despair.
We know what our leaders (tormentors) want. It is power. Not for their parties, not for their communities, not for their followers not even for their children. But only for themselves. So let them have it.
None of them is in a happy place at the moment. The Government has never been more unpopular. The economy has long spiralled out of control. Kiir has slumped from hero to arch villain. Riek, lounging in quasi-incarceration in South Africa, remains the number #1 enemy of the people, a position that is only occasionally challenged by Lam Akol. But the deepest public contempt is reserved for the Nairobi-based FDs – the self-proclaimed “historical leaders”.
I am convinced that all these people would like to wind the clock back to a post-2013 situation when they all lived like lords in Juba.
The key is to persuade them that this is perfectly possible. They could all be in Juba again, enjoying a win-win peace dividend. The greatest barrier to this is fear and mistrust. On these two pillars: fear and mistrust, rests the fate of our nation. All mediation efforts need to focus on alleviating and addressing these primordial instincts in our so-called leaders.
I have mentioned nothing about the country here. Where is the interest of the country in all this? Well, we are a long-downtrodden nation. Even the Bible says this. We can wait. Our first step must be to stop these rogues from killing us like rats each day.
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