Peace will no doubt return and the people of South Sudan, the Nuba and Funj, may start again to enjoy their freedom as they used to a thousands years before the colonial intrusion into their lands by the Arabs, Turks and other Europeans. Without necessarily casting aspersions on the present context and the way things are managed by the political- and administrative elite in the SPLM-administered areas, it can’t escape us that the present inertia bordering on apathy and indifference must change and the people’s participation must gain more momentum. As members of the liberation movement and the ‘revolutionary’ armed struggle, we may have not achieved the exact objective we started off with. This is natural. Not all revolutions achieve their objectives, particularly when the objective is not a one time process of national independence or regime change but a more profound cause such as socio-economic transformation, which must be preceded or accompanied by change of attitudes and social perceptions. The Tupamoros were not as lucky as the Viet Cong, and so were the Simbas. The bottom line, however, is that we have negotiated and have managed to achieve on the table the right of our people to self-determination. The casting of the vote in the referendum will seal this phase of the struggle.
This would not have come about without the relentless armed struggle we waged since 1983 and the previous 17 years war. However, it was believed that armed struggle and the war would lead to transformation or leave its mark on the rural reality which is presented by South Sudan. The masters of guerrilla warfare, starting from Mao Tse Tung, General Giap, Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Augustino Neto, Edwardo Mondlane, and many others, successfully organized the peasantry into a revolutionary force that changed the political reality of their respective countries. Mao transformed feudal China into a modern state, a nuclear power on the road of becoming a super power in its own right. Cuba has weathered all blockages to build a state capable of satisfying the basic needs of its people, economic difficulties notwithstanding. While discussing the revolutionary armed struggle it may be a bit too premature to judge whether the new brand guerrilla leaders in the Horn of Africa and Great Lakes Region Kabila, Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, Isayias Afwerki, Meles Zenawi 2nd, John Garang would climb the ladder of fame as those who led their people in the sixties did.
The DR Congo is yet to emerge from the trauma of having its revolutionary transformation after decades of rape, oppression and exploitation aborted by its former allies turned its natural resource scavengers and pillagers. Eritrea and Rwanda have become highly militarized and the evolution of democratic governance in them is in serious jeopardy. Uganda and Ethiopia are nursing internal conflicts which seem to play the role of keeping afloat the leaders and their regimes. The social and political transformation of a people does not come about as a result of a gift bestowed by those in leadership but as a result of conscientious relationships and interactions between the leaders and the people. It is in this symmetrical interaction that the leaders and the people generate and synthesize ideas, which they both construct into implementable programmes constituting the articles of their daily struggle for socio-economic change and political participation. This creates the ground necessary and imperative for the unity of purpose as a condition for success or victory. When, at the end of it all, a verdict is pronounced that a certain political process has yielded results or not it is precisely because of this organic unity between the people and between the people and their leaders in the pursuit of their aspirations. The unity translates into a common culture, albeit ideology, which starts to sprout in the course of the struggle and is now consolidated as victory is achieved. The people continue to struggle, albeit by other means, to consolidate those gains. The armed struggle that begun in 1983 was not just shooting the enemy soldiers per se; it had deep penetrating consequences on the people of South Sudan, the Nuba and the Funj and their ways of life. Not that only, but the war itself also had tremendous effect on the enemy and other social and political forces in the North. Things will never be the same again in the Sudan, even if it tried to retain the status quo. The war in Darfur is a perfect indicator. The development of the armed struggle leading to massive movement of the combatants from one region meeting with people they have never known before, notwithstanding the frictions and cleavages that emerged as a result, has kind of unified the people of South Sudan across ethnic divides. This is not to deny that there are massive problems. They will continue to plague us even as their objective and subjective bases recede. Luigi Adwok once said that "tribalism was an unavoidable stage in our development. What we needed to do was to pass through it quickly". This underscores some of the difficulties we have encountered in the course of our struggle for freedom and which have been categorized as tribalism or ethnic inclinations in the distribution of resources, including positions of authority and responsibility without reference to qualification and experience. We will soon be faced with the task of building our country and to further forge the unity of our people.
In this we will definitely require the assistance and intervention of the international community. But that we have friends should not translate into relaxing our resolve for our development. This brings me to the subject matter of this piece that "we should run while they walk", metaphorical as it may seem, it summarizes the catalogue of issues we must surmount to legitimize our claim to victory and achievement of the right of self-determination. I resent complacency and self-aggrandizement. More often than not I want to put a premium in what I undertake to achieve and have the capacity for self-criticism for shortcomings and failures. In any case the sources of failure must be analyzed and defined as a basis for their rectification. When peace returns to South Sudan, which entails the other marginalized areas of Nuba, Funj and Abyei, they will start off first the mitigating the effect of war in a process referred to as the 5Rs. That will be a daunting task for all, including the unborn, whether at home or in the Diaspora, given the scale of destruction over the last two decades. That is why we must run while they walk. This may sound superfluous or flippant but, I am serious. It happened in Europe and Japan after the Second World War. The Marshall Plan apart, the Europeans had the culture of hard work and quickly rebuilt their cities and industries devastated by war. They had to run to catch up with America in social and economic development. What about us the Sudanese; are we not going the same way? I believe there is talk of big money waiting to flow like the Nile into rehabilitation of war-torn South Sudan. The Europeans, the Japanese, the Americans have pledged money to South Sudan when peace comes. My question in this respect is will we have the capacity and organization to absorb and benefit from this money or will this, like the humanitarian assistance over the last 15 years, be siphoned back to Europe, America and Japan through avenues in East Africa? In the last two decades we have allowed foreigner relief workers to manage us and our affairs. We allowed nurses to boss over our medical doctors because the money came with the European and American nurses. There was a government in South Sudan with a medium developed civil service. We had teachers, lawyers, agriculturalists, veterinarians, career police and law enforcement officers, indeed different types of university graduates for which our people paid for their education. The only job we could offer was carrying the Kalashnikov as if human resources were an issue to the extent that now many of them have become illiterate and may not be of any use in terms of what they learnt. This means that we need to double our efforts to train many people to compensate for the development efforts missed over the last two decades. Another area where we need to move faster, if not run, is to curb corruption and the entire of irresponsibility and impunity. There is talk of people declaring their wealth, but, to me, the issue is not declaration of wealth per se but declaration of how one accumulated this wealth. Unlike money, cattle, which seem to have been the mode of accumulation, can be quantified and categorized, whether they came from the auction or from the dowry of a relative. No country can attain a reasonable level of socio-economic development when those in power or positions of authority busy themselves lining their pockets. Linked to corruption is dispensation of public service posts. The first sign of southern dissatisfaction with Sudanisation of colonial posts in 1953 was when the newly formed "national" government absorbed only junior southern administrators. The GoSS must exercise sensitivity and prudence when creating its bureaucracy. What is happening in the ‘Tent City’ may be the beginning of the unmaking of South Sudan. It looks like we are being taken back to the dark days of the Southern Regional Government in Juba. Wasn’t kokora a good lesson and yet, in our stampede to construct a bureaucracy, we are oblivious to it. "A human being can not make changes in real life if he has not affect changes in his own ideas...in the same way that there can never be peace without a power to protect it." Anwar Sadat 1977
