Ebola and Politics are like the warring parties

Warring parties are like Siamese twins; you cant have enough of one without having too much of the other

Ebola and Politics are like the warring parties

By Opoka Christopher Arop

The Ebola virus proves everything I already believed about politics. It proves that certain things just can’t be mixed. We can’t and should not lie to ourselves that this country will ever be the same again. We have countless times in our short history attempted at mixing water and oil, then Nuer and Dinka, and now Kiir and Dr. Riek. And it won’t work.

This is simply because, rejecting that alluding to the fact that many experts on South Sudan believed that President Kiir’s office was toothless from 2005 till 2012 when the he sacked his Vice, is a fault line we continue to tread blindly, even when we are fully aware of the pitfalls of such mistake.

Most international advisors I have had the chance to interact with including some from BearingPoint, Deloitte Consulting, Adam Smith International and the larger DFID, USAID, NPA as well as JDT; all shared a common view that Dr. Riek Machar could not be trusted because he was able to run the country while sitting back as a vice president.

Was this because they didn’t like the manner in which Dr. Riek was managing the affairs of the state? Was it his cunning character? Was it is his wealth in management or mismanagement? Was it his statesmanship that drew a bewildered international community into a web they desperately wanted to break free from? So what is the connection between a seemingly failing politics of Ebola as is the case with the SPLM in Juba and the SPLM in Addis Ababa?

You might find this surprising. The Ebola virus is not standing for elections next year. Ebolais threatening to overshadow the peace talks in Addis. How could the Ebola threat be so beautifully written that all seem to agree? Opposition members of parliament have not raised a single question as to budget spending on Ebola emergency, quarantine site location, Ebola check machines and the procurement processes involved.

While attending a discussion in Uganda when the fighting in Bor was raging following the December 15^th crisis, I couldn’t help but admire the passion with which Ugandans, at most the politicians; expressed their disdain and dislike for a Dr. Riek Machar Presidency. Mr. David K. Mafabi is President Museveni’s Private Secretary for Political Affairs and was an Aid to the late Dr. John Garang. Mafabi says he even wrote some of the press statements for the SPLA during their clashes with the Nasir faction as indicated in Dr. Lam Akol’s ‘The Nasir Declaration’.

The other guest speaker was Hon. Simon Mulongo who is a legislator for Bubulo East and a former Director for the Eastern Africa Standby Brigade.

While Mulongo is a pragmatist in his approach and a politician with a business ideology at the center “what makes me not agree with my President (Museveni) is the issue of sponsoring wars…that you can go and sponsor a war in another country and after they have taken over, you return home and wash off your dust as if nothing has happened and you have nothing to follow. I am trained as a realist to believe in conquering and extracting whether by second or third parties. If I went to South Sudan, I will conquer, control and put in place a system to extract to pay back, either by having Ugandan companies operate there or having some Ugandan economic influence there so that they meet the cost of the military operation. My big man [President Museveni] is different; he says he is a pan Africanist and says that if your brother’s house is on fire, you don’t talk of capitalist interests, you help first,” Mulongo said.

Mulongo went on to regret Uganda’s intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Uganda was accused of benefiting from illegal timber, diamond and gold trade. “I was in Somalia; you see the UPDF boots on the ground, very influential and respected, they pacified large parts of Somalia and there is no single bottle of Rwenzori (bottled mineral water). The water you see there is made in Kenya, Turkey, Holland including cheese, yet we (Uganda) have a problem with market of the products we are producing,” Mulongo explained.

Mulongo however said “if Dr. Riek is to become a leader in South Sudan, he will have to reconfigure his leadership style and character [Riek has never savored links with the LRA.] Mulongo maintained nonetheless that “in politics there are no permanent friends and enemies, but interests.” He concluded that “by necessity, Museveni and Dr. Riek will work together.”

Dear reader, pardon my selection bias in whose viewpoint I have presented first. Other than my creative license to do so and hope that in the process I score the right impact, I have thus committed what you may consider a grave error.

Mafabi as a veteran who was for many years in the struggle with the SPLA has not shed off any of his admiration for the cause as well as for the movement. His opinion of Dr. Riek Machar has been stern and resolute. “Dr. Riek is not a reformist,” he said and added that “the extremely violent massacre in Bor, the coup in Nasir was unnecessary and demands for democratic reform in the middle of a war were unrealistic.”

Mafabi said of the December 15^th 2013 incident that “it became a question of who strikes first. So Salva moved quickly.” Mafabi told the gathering that close to four coups had earlier been planned in South Sudan before December 2013.

Mafabi added that by “disbanding government [to consolidate his hold to power] that depended on a contributory army, President Kiir did not seek alternative curative options and without proper reintegration of the army” the President was “creating a wound for which he didn’t have an aspirin to keep away the flies or bacteria from infecting it, so the obvious happened.”

Many people tend to underestimate President Salva Kiir saying that “he did not go far with formal education and because he may talk inaccurately,” Mafabi said and warned that Salva Kiir “arrested and detained the Deputy Commander-in-chief Kerbino Kuanyin Bol from 1986-1987 and the following year President Kiir arrested and detained the Deputy chief of Administration Arok Thon Arok, a cousin to the late Dr. John Garang.”

I was shocked to learn all these from Ugandans. I was shocked because, to date I wonder if there are any South Sudanese who can offer such analysis of our neighboring countries’ leaders and politics. The rest of us have maintained that we should not mix in other people’s issues. For example, the current crises in Cuiebet County has attracted only dismal interest if not disinterest altogether from the South Sudanese public, because we don’t like to mix.

Like the politics of Ebola has only led to more deaths and infections, so will the politics of the SPLM in Juba and the SPLM in Addis Ababa or elsewhere in the world. If we continue to look at ourselves as character figures representing intrinsic group interests, this country will never become one. The oil will rise to the top and the water will find its place. My mother says one can’t urinate and defecate all at the same time and that one hand can’t wash itself.