Easier to achieve disintegration than unity

Editorial, Khartoum Monitor

Nov 11, 2006 — Disintegration is not an impossible objective to achieve. On the contrary, the tendencies and activities which stimulate the urge for disintegration are really more unlikely to eradicate. It all borders on power. Power corrupts. It also borders on Wealth. Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister, had said, “Working to earn money is not evil but loving it is.”

Love for money can compel weak-hearted people to kill even relatives and parents because what they care about most is money and nothing else. Power and wealth are the two sides of the same coin which paralyze and distort the consciences of those who are addicted to economic and political power. With money, politics is dead. Without politics, money has no protection. Money needs security and both money and security need political power.

Those who have made it to political power work hard to raise money in order to achieve economic power which they will protect through their political power.

Along the roads leading to Juba, about 42 people have been killed, several others wounded and vehicles set ablaze. A doctor at the Juba Teaching and Referral Hospital, who declined to be named, said: “One of the wounded was brought in at night, while 16 wounded were still being treated.” Those who carried out the attacks happened to be people from Juba, some of whom live in the very area which was attacked. What would have blinded a person into killing people with whom he lives? Speculations are that money is at work.

Well, it is not just money but the degree of love one has for money. It is enslavement by money that makes a person blind. Too much love for money kills the conscience. Once we have a dead conscience, we lack self-restraint and we can behave like wild animals. This is what has been happening in the Sudanese political and economic landscape. Fingers were pointed at the LRA. But when it was discovered some of the culprits were sons of South Sudan, the wild speculations shifted. These are the type of activities which can easily lead to disintegration rather than unity.