I remember a saying from my childhood before I had to flee my home before I found my way to the camps in Ethiopia. “When elephants fight only the grass suffers.” These days the elephants are again rampaging in Juba, and the grass is truly suffering. That grass is our homeland.
Sadly, the big elephants of South Sudan are so busy fighting over Juba that they have forgotten the rest of our country. Juba is not South Sudan, but the current national leadership thinks that it is. That is why they are not building roads to connect the many cities and towns. No, all roads must lead to Juba. That is why there is no effective electrification elsewhere, and why there is no water control being developed despite the flooding. That is why our nation lacks the beginnings of a good education or even in many areas potable water.
Juba was the creation of a European, especially British, sense of geography. Placed to control as much as possible of the Nile. It is not at the heart of our country. Yet, it has been for as long as there has been a South Sudan at the heart of the spending. Hotels, streets, and office buildings; but what of the rest of the nation?
While the political leviathans poke and thrust at one another over control of that city of less than a million, the remaining millions of our countryfolk are doing without. It is time for us in the diaspora to recognize the need for a change: a change in priorities and a change in how our country goes about its governance. We must become the change that the nation desperately needs. How do we begin? First, we must start talking to one another. We, the South Sudanese of the diaspora must begin discussing the situation at home, not by focusing on tribes and conflicts, not by pursuing grievances, but by seeking common ground and looking for solutions that will help our homeland.
We must recognize that much of the violence that takes place in Juba has been engineered to keep us from working together. For, if we come to recognize our common cause, then even though we are but blades of grass, we can overwhelm those elephants who would destroy our country. In the end, when the elephants are gone, when they have exhausted themselves and fallen to the ground, it is the grass that will survive. It is South Sudan that will rise and flourish. Let us all agree to work towards that glorious day.
~Deng Mayik Atem
Publisher of Ramciel Magazine and Author of Jumping Over the Ram
