Lam Ajawin: Rebirth to carrying the flame

By Peter Bedepiny

July 13, 2009 — Unlike John Garang who radiated his charisma through eclectic mixture of humour and optimism combined with the arrogance of a skilled rhetorician; Lam Ajawin charisma sprang up from his didactic impulse to set things right, sort of an engineer’s meticulousness, who would dissect the blueprint of a building project only to point out the structural errors in the original design soon or later you would concur to his conclusion about the need to go back to the drawing board. This ability evokes adverse opinion from his critics who sometimes lay against him in his pomp. He is said to be proud or overbearing and far too aware of his talents, but to quibble about truth makes the critics look petty and spiteful; to strike a lofty attitude one must praise him. Lam Ajawin’s better qualities, including his sure choice of revolutionary tactics and his skills as a high power voltage of political ideas.

Amongst the reformists (Dhol Achil, Joseph Odhouh, Arok Thon, and Martin Majier,etc.) in the SPLM/A (Sudan People Liberation Movement/Army) many of whom would end up facing court-martial, imprisonment and eventually died victims of Garang’s arbitrariness, it would rest on Lam Ajawin’s shoulder in 1991 to shed bright light on John Garang’s wrong-headed leadership. It became apparent then that time of evasiveness and adventurism had run out and that constructive debate was needed inside the rank-and-file of the movement to assess the cost of the warfare as South Sudan drown in blood of its citizen soldiers. Lam argued that the main objective of struggle must be explicitly spelled out clear-cut position, i.e., the Self-determination of South. South Sudan people took arms not for the sake of fighting but to find a political solution to their problem. It is not a missed to wonder had the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) or its equivalence were negotiated at the time when SPLA was victorious and control eighty percent of the South Sudan how would the CPA look like. In hindsight the balance sheet of John Granag’s adventure seemed to indicate a great deal of waste. Only the scars of the war veterans and the empty places in the widows’ beds seemed to attest to the reality of those years, and time soon will eliminate even these silent witnesses.

The rest is history as the saying goes, but it is important to point out how Lam was vilified and victimised by his opponents further by suggesting to the public that he had received fund in exchange to sign the secrete Agreement in Frankfurt, Germany with then the government representative Ali Al-Haj. Retrospectively, we now know that the Frankfurt Agreement will go down in history of the South-North conflict as a milestone in which for the first time South had mastered the command of the political situation in regard to the conflict, that’s reintroduction of Self-determination, the citadels of South varies political thoughts. Riek Machar was duped this led to some infractions between him and Lam. As for fund obviously, these allegations were trumped up and never found to have merit by the public but invented to humiliate and wound him sufficiently to keep him from fighting back.

Listening to Lam’s radio interviews during the Abuja peace talks held from May 26th to June 4th 1992, you can’t help but be aspired for his powerful rhythm of his speech, his tenor but never fatiguing voice, his soaring pathos, his rigid logic clear as polished-steel. He would charge “since 1983 the SPLA has been fighting for a united secular Sudan. In Khartoum, governments of all colours and hues had since came and gone besides no major party in the North was anywhere near to conceding a secular state in a united Sudan. It’s callous to continue shedding southern blood to impose a unity the North does not want”. Such was unadorned style he displayed an astounding ability to frame the debate toward the core of each point at issue.

Today SPLM is run by those who were dastardly lied low muted with mixture of fear and compliancy as rank-and-file members, they might express themselves confidently in generalities, but lacked an adults’ memory for details. Like children who would not acknowledge the obvious instead they blame or distort, they ludicrously continue to abdicate their responsibility and role to the current perilous situation in the South. As adults we must acknowledge the obvious, that SPLM has failed miserably wasted four years complaining with no serious works. National Congress Party (NCP) as an adversary will try to undermine your efforts given the contestable mood of the relations between two CPA partners, what more should the NCP collapse today or Al-Bashir die in a heart attack, South Sudan would still be plunged in paralysis simply put the two sets of problem are invariant. SPLM intransigent political elite did not understand the scale of savagery in which the disenchanted people of South Sudan were brutalized by the experience of warfare. The problem is that they have misjudged their intractable perception that they can control everything. Instead of mitigating tension they resorted to the old order of business-as-usual to consolidate power by fanning tribal divisions in an old fashion divide-and-conquer, they stirred up tension as a result the society has turned into Molotov cocktail bounce to blow up anytime.

Salva Kiir has missed an opportunity to spend the political capital of good-will given by South Sudan people. A genuine determination to put aside sterile ideology of tribalism and become simply fellows citizens to make use of the ablest men available, regardless of their political past, to create a strong, free, united and prosperous South Sudan. Coronation has never been a good idea. To be fair, nation building has never been an easy task, even the mighty United State of America has to admit it failures in Iraq beyond it professes objectives which is to build stable and democratic Iraq.

South Sudan is no different than Iraq perhaps worse still a foetus nation with terrifying structural features like egregious embezzlement of public funds, pretentious superiority, criminality and thugery. The question stared us at the face; what should we do: well the answer depends on how you feel about the current situation; I don’t care if you were a bureaucrat, who just bought the Hummer H2 driving crazily with your second pregnant wife from Atlabara to the hillside of Jebel Kujur at the cliff if you don’t change direction then you are headed for calamity. Yet some might say let this lunatic smash to the rock that way the alike will get superb lesson. But overseeing life-and-death matters for a population is no place for apathy; we must not capitulate to the grinding of unplannedness, opportunism, exclusion, blackmail and bigotry. Six years term transition was in essence so that the south can look at itself in the Miraya, today the picture is foul and skewed. The clique around Salva Kiir are obsessed with power as such he became entangled, they are isolating themselves to an ever-greater extent, as such they proved incapable of estimating the situation as a whole, foreseeing the future and issuing broad directives to SPLM. The policy becomes pettifogging or tail-endist. Any attempts on anyone’s part to generalize the difficulties, grasp their connection and look ahead into the future, arouse alarm in their mind and call forth accusations of treachery. SPLM unity for them is the following: ‘don’t you dare criticize our policy; don’t dare to pose any new tasks and new questions without our permission; don’t dare to pose seriously the question of a struggle against corruptions.

Lam Ajawin’s rebirth hypnotized by the consummation of the task at hand. The solution to the current off track course is political. At the time when our people is on threshold to pronounce to the world the birth of a new country we cannot afford the missteps, and none other than Lam Ajawin has the calibre to such an undertaking. One can make vast speculation, that he is the sort of man who, if he is given full power in a great plan of this kind, will work miracles. There is not a drop of vanity in him, he is totally indifferent to any title or to the trapping of power; he is, however, boundlessly jealous of his own role in history and in that sense he is ambitious. Ultimately, for the public the choice is clear between the forces of freedom and progress against the forces of nursery of despotism and reaction. It was a huge blunder to sideline Lam Ajawin and hope that his star waned. Peace, so it seemed, offered no outlet for noble and idealistic impulses. For many of us it seem that South Sudan is being treated like kind of a general store situated at a dusty cross road where States and Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) powers meet at which every free traveller feel free to loot.

Leaders like great artists develop a personal dream that they offer as a public possession if it is accepted, they become renowned, but should it ultimately be discarded, they suffer the loss of both a private dream and a public identity. As people rallied around Lam Ajawin, they allowed him to regains his familiar role. They rallied because they still believed in him and his heroic identity. They were able to rally because as a torch bearer, he told them the truth and gave them something to believe in, that’s to bring the people together in commoner.

Peter Bedepiny: is a mathematician. He can be reached at [email protected]