Vive John Garang (1-6)

By Setepano Wöndu

July 19, 2008 — July is here again. For thirty days we shall be remembering the zenith of John Garang’s life. During this month, we recall what he used to tell us collectively as a people and individually as comrades. This is the time for us to reflect on his dreams both the moderate and wild ones.

John Garang dreamt of turning South Sudan into the greatest organic farm in the world. He was at total ease telling politicians, aid workers, journalists, friends and anyone who cared to hear him about this gigantic estate. He promised to invest our oil revenue to literally fuel agriculture. He wanted to start off the Government of Southern Sudan with the agenda of agrarian reform, agricultural expansion, and food security. He knew then what the world is now realizing, that there was a dangerous and widening gap between population growth and world food output. Back then, the world was not starving. Food prices were affordable. Europe was burdened by food ‘mountains’. America had so much corn that they had to burn it as bio-gas. Garang saw the crunch coming.

John Garang dreamt of planting a fruit orchard along the Nile between Nimule and Juba. He wanted a ‘Garden of Eden’. He wanted to lend a helping hand to bio-diversity. He wanted the restore the original rich habitat for the birds, insects, reptiles and game of the great savannah. When Garang lived, the world was so rich in fruit that avocado, vanilla, and mangoes were being used for blending body lotion. Those were the days when cooking oil was so plentiful and people consumed so much of it that average human body weight increased beyond what the bone frame and the heart could co sustain. Weight loss schemes became a very lucrative industry. When John Garang was with us, the world had lots of sugar, so much that it became the common denominator of almost everything we drank and ate. This sweet substance became a health hazard. At that time of plenty, John Garang was planning for the production of more, not less sugar, vegetable oil, animal fat, and fruits in South Sudan.

John Garang dreamt of exporting beef to the Middle East and Europe because our cows are not mad. The foot and mouth disease, Garang said, afflicted European cattle because the farmers fed their animals, not on grass as required by nature, but on meat based feeds. At that time people were so well fed that they became choosy and picky about the colour of the meat they ate. Rich people refused to eat beef and mutton. The African elite had to fight gout, a new disease attributed to excessive ‘red meat’. Those were the years when important people only ate ‘white meat’, the new exotic reference to poultry and fish. Adult humans can behave like little children when their stomachs are full; they play with the food. Today, the international community is worried, not only about how to feed displaced populations but how to satisfy the appetites of urban workers. Governments in particular worried that violence could erupt as a result of widespread famine. In societies where regimes can be changed through the ballot, food shortages and high prices can make or doom governments. Everyone knows that ‘a hungry man is an angry man’. If we heed John Garang’s advice, we can turn our country from a destination to a source of food supplies. We can become the solution to a global crisis and earn money to do the good things we want to do to ourselves and families.

Fellow countrymen and women, Garang is no longer with us but he told us what to do with the oil revenue in the bank. Let us now create the institutions for delivering financial resources to the agricultural sector. There are many credit models out there being practiced by our neighbors in eastern Africa. There are many more in the library. We have a few men and women with world class education in crop and animal husbandry. We have a few good economists too. While we train more, let us hire expatriates to help us during the transition. This is what every emerging economy does. What we cannot do though is to fold our hands and watch our labour, land, water, and pasture wasting away. Three years into our CPA, we have not exported a kilogram of grain. We are still importing pulses, flour, vegetables, fruits, and white meat. Is it because we are lazy? Is it because we have chewed our dollars? If not so, is it because John Garang has died?

[To be continued on …]

The author is the Sudan’s Ambassador to Japan