• This isn’t just an everyday assassination attempt. It comes out with worrying political overtones.
• This is the time Sudanese leaders should reflect on their country, the mistakes they allowed to happen
Image: REUTERS
The assassination attempt on Sudan Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok is an indication the country isn't out of the woods yet.
Usurpers of power aren’t ready to let Sudan heal. They are at it again, barely six months before the ink that signed the agreement between the Transitional Military Council and the Sudanese Professional Association dries.
But this isn’t just an everyday assassination attempt. It comes out with worrying political overtones. And the ordinary Sudanese folks don’t deserve a modicum of it. These people have had their fair share of the problems that come with a dictatorship. They have been tried with many tests – human rights abuse, repression, corruption, name it – like gold in a refiner’s fire. They have passed through the danger of living under an absolute government. The least they deserve is peace.
This development is a textbook case of failure to exercise true hallmarks of leadership by the Sovereignty Council – the body tasked with the responsibility to extricate Sudan from the ebbs. It's strange that the establishment in Sudan hasn't learnt from over five decades of harrowing civil war that claimed thousands of innocent lives, state negligence and atrocities under deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir. It’s strange how power can manipulate a man’s soul.
This is the time Sudanese leaders should reflect on their country, the mistakes they allowed to happen and endeavor to initiate a conversation on how to prevent similar wrongdoings in the future. But we're seeing exactly the opposite. A group of selfish power barons that is slow to embrace change.
For this cabal quest for power is stronger than peace. That's why they will stop at nothing to preserve themselves.
Understood differently, this development, coming a few days after the Sudanese authorities hinted that it would extradite Bashir to ICC could mean a different thing. Who wants Hamdok dead? Is this recent threat to his life got to do with the ICC case?
Bashir, alongside three others, is a wanted man by the court of last resort to answering to charges on war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
It will be remembered that Hamdok – a technocrat with impeccable credentials, by any measure – took over a country torn apart by war and economic meltdown. He promised to oversee reforms of financial institutions and reorganize Sudan’s political system. So far he has rejuvenated the push to have the US remove Sudan from its state sponsors of Terrorism list. A move that experts have argued is critical for Sudan’s restoration. Forces that want to crater this process are for sure the real enemies of Sudan.
The writer is a journalism student at Multimedia University of Kenya