It has been long comrades, but I have a story.
In the early 1990s, I was in a refugee camp in Uganda where we survived on every help available until we established resilience and some sources of livelihood as the second Sudanese war raged on.
One thing about my culture is the foods we eat, and rats were one of our delicacies. Since it was a rural village, we hunted rats every dry season which enhanced our diet properly.
Conflict was never far from us as we battled for some of the scarce resources to sustain our lives. On one specific hunting escapade I had with two other teenagers then, we set ablaze a small bush in the neighborhood to allow us to hunt for rats unhindered. The fire was meant to chase the rats into their holes so that we could easily dig them out from their holes for easy killing. We did not know that one man, an elderly ruthless bully in his early 40s who terrorized both animals and humans in the neighborhood with bows and arrows, had set his rat traps in the same bush to harvest the same.
Resources were indeed scarce! Word spread very fast in the small village and within minutes, the aged dangerous hunter with feet and hand palms hardened like dry mud from numerous fights with both humans and animals, arrived at our killing field finding us with almost a hundred prey laid on the ground. With face oozing with sweat and lips shaking in anger, the man aimed his weapons at us and within a blink of an eye we had scattered in different directions only to assemble in the evening for a meal and retire back to the nearby bushes for the night to keep away from our predator! The hunter became the hunted!
Now, the revitalized peace agreement allowed First Vice President Dr. Riek Machar to lay his traps at the Ministry of Defense and Veterans Affairs and other strategic portfolios from the national to county administrative units all over the country just like other parties to the peace agreement signed to share the feast.
Gen Salva Kiir, however, the marauding tormentor, preferring a win-lose alternative started razing down Dr. Machar’s traps starting with the latter’s wife, the biggest trap in the hunting grounds. Now Machar has talked of a ‘Plan B’ and it remains unclear what he is banking on as talks dubbed the “meeting of the principals” have smoky results.
What is next?
Kiir may demand for an alternative person, a softer target mimicking the ‘Upper Nile Governorship’ scenario. The president may also offer a less powerful docket to Mrs. Machar or simply offer ‘security guarantees’ to his long-time deputy and many a time peace partner, Dr. Machar.
The First Vice President’s camp does not seem to have a tough ‘Plan B’ other than calling out to the guarantors of the peace and the International Community for intervention. The toughest alternative would be to pull out of his camp from the Agreement and Road Map and seek yet again, an escape route out of Juba which is more difficult than a bank robbery at the moment.
IGAD, AU, the monitoring mechanisms, and the Troika indeed need to come out condemning the actions of President Kiir and to tame him by all means possible. The Biden Administration needs to do what President Barack Obama did when Kiir invaded Heglig. Ask Kiir to back down and get out of the mess by all means.
For me and my fellow muatinin (citizenry), we have started sweating profusely and maybe sweating plasma in the coming days, after all these hostile drums from our leaders already add to the elevated temperatures resulting from global warming.
We shall also try stock beans and dura (sorghum) as always advised by those who flee whenever we start beating our hostile drums.
And may peace prevail!
The writer, Wori Moses, is an MBA student and can be reached via wojurma@gmail.com
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.