Obamachaos in Southern Sudan

The horror of their presen-ting the world with television pictures of their frightened, harassed, wounded, mutilated, hungry children, women, humiliated people crowded like panicked livestock inside United Nations shelter sites; uprooted people carrying on their heads and backs little possessions they could carry, was a calculated contempt for a people’s three decades of fighting for […]

The horror of their presen-ting the world with television pictures of their frightened, harassed, wounded, mutilated, hungry children, women, humiliated people crowded like panicked livestock inside United Nations shelter sites; uprooted people carrying on their heads and backs little possessions they could carry, was a calculated contempt for a people’s three decades of fighting for freedom and human dignity not only for themselves but for human civilization. Its timing recalled the explosion of horrendous pictures of genocide against black people under a black government. The genocide desecrated Nelson Mandela’s rise up to firmaments of human glory. A French historian claimed that President Bill Clinton blocked all attempts by African governments to prevent, and later, stop the genocide in Rwanda. It is as if South Sudan is Obama’s own gift to Madiba as he weeps in After-Africa.
Mayhem in South Sudan may be part of Obama’s policy of unlocking Israel’s stranglehold on American foreign policy with an insurance policy of giving the southern lip of the Mediterranean Sea a red lipstick of blood, guns, bombs raising flames from Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to Syria and Iraq. Turkey will be lucky to escape. With the ‘’Arab Spring’’ awakening Arabs to familiar art of slaughtering each other, Israel has no reason to scream for perpetual protective American cuddles. Obama can turn to the vital matter of containing China’s waves of economic and military power sucking in all of Asia.
In Africa, China must be countered with chaos. Collateral benefit of murdering Gadaffi scattered guns of wrath to Mali and Central African Republic where China is lurching for access to uranium, gold, diamonds and other raw materials. In South Sudan a hunting pack of Germans, Russians, Indians, South Africans and China are chasing oil and other minerals. The Chinese are already building an oil refinery in Uganda to meet Museveni’s cheeky demand for one behind his kitchen and in faraway Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast.
There is evidence that South Sudan’s violence was cooked in Khartoum.  In 2008, Sudan Tribune, a Khartoum-based newspaper carried an article screaming about a document titled ‘’Garang’s Secret Plan to Marginalize the Nuer at Naivasha 2005’’with a plan to ‘’exterminate the Nuer nationality’’ by ‘’the SPLM power elites, supported by external powers’’. It advocated a plan ‘’for the people of Greater Upper Nile to unite their ranks and files and pull out of the South and declares the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)’’, since ‘’Greater Upper Nile region could be viable because of its oil fields and natural gas and other natural resources’’.  The document also urges the nine Ngok Dinka Chiefdoms in  Bahr-el-Ghazal state to share oil and other natural resources with the nomadic Messirriyi  tribes who in 108 years had seasonally graze their livestock in the region.
The target of this cons-piracy virus could be Riek Machar who once fought against John Garang’s SPLM/A; signing a peace deal with President Omar Beshir in 1997;  briefly serving as an assistant to Beshir in Khartoum.  He returned to fight the war for liberation in 2002.Beshir’s visit to Salva Kiir as war escalated suggests that the Americans and Britons got Machar . He wants to secure the oil states.  
Kiir disagreed with Garang’s vision of ‘’New Sudan’’. For Garang the historic mission of SPLM/A was to prevent an ‘’inevitable disintegration’’ of a ‘’United Sudan’’ by providing ‘’a correct solution to the nationality and religious questions’’. In a ‘’socialist United Sudan’’, religious and racial discrimination would not be legal.
Salva Kiir had joined the war in 1983 under the Anya-Anya 2 to fight in a ‘’Southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement’’. For him and Machar the choice was either to be a ‘’second class’’ citizen in Sudan or a ‘’free person in your own homeland’’. A stubborn statistic stands between them. Riek Machar’s 800,000 Nuer ethnic group come second to Kiir’s over one million Dinka nationality.
Robert Kennedy held out the wisdom that any African American who marries a white or Asiatic woman/man must be unstable in mind and personality. It is not clear if his insight came from research by experts in his office as America’s Attorney General. Riek Machar married a British lady. British and American intelligence operatives may have sought to test Kennedy’s dictum on him. His announcement that he would contest the presidency in 2015 elections would have increased their hunt.
In our Africa, political actors do not wear easily realities of having less or more educational titles than their allies or competitors.  Idi Amin’s military officers enjoyed getting university- educated top civil servants kneel down in salute to their military medals. Mobutu Sese Seko was accused of tossing critics out of aircrafts to test if PhDs are life-savers like parachutes used by military paratroopers.
Riek Machar had only studied academic doctrines on strategic studies. Kiir studied in the school of the gun. A seed of antagonism lurked here once Kiir and Machar became president and vice-president, respecti-vely. The roots of blazing guns in South Sudan may be this education bomb. Frightened civilians ran to UN shelters and not to popular rallies in the streets in defence of “democracy’’. Peace builders must face this education bomb.
One way forward is to choose presidential candidates for the 2015 election from minority ethnic groups not related to Dinka and Nuer nationalities. Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah were excellent examples.

(Editor’s note: The writer’s name in last Tuesday’s column piece, ‘100 years after’, Eugene Enahoro, was inadvertently omitted.)