News that an injured former South Sudan Vice President Riek Machar has been transferred to The Sudan for treatment adds a new twist to the sad story that is becoming of Africa's newest country.
A peace deal that was signed in April to put an end to 21 months of civil war in the country Sudan has fallen through.
Similar truces brokered by Kenya, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad) and the United Nations in Nairobi and Addis Ababa in the past have failed to hold the country together. Last month, forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those of his former estranged Vice President Reik Machar opened fire at the presidential palace in Juba and since then, the whereabouts of Dr Machar have been a mystery until yesterday when conflicting reports filtered in.
The path to the birth of Africa's newest country in 2011, was fraught with bloodshed with its now northern neighbour.
To the Southerners, independence conjured up images of tarmacked roads, good schools, food security, well-equipped hospitals and generally, a happy life thereafter. What excited many South Sudanese was the freedom to chart their country's destiny as they wished. The feeling was just like in the 1960s as the independence wave spread across most of Africa.
But, alas, it faced great peril as well. Five years after its independence, a raging civil had devoured South Sudan. A war precipitated by a political power struggle pitting Mr Kiir against Dr Machar, whom he sacked months before an attempted coup in December 2013 has dashed the hopes of the 10 million souls in South Sudan.
Since the skirmishes, the UN estimates that 10,000 people have been killed, up to 1 million have been displaced and millions others face imminent starvation.
Sudan is bleeding. Its citizens now exist in conditions of poverty no better than those they fought to escape when they were part of the larger Sudan. The situation is precarious and the state of affairs is sullying the happy chorus of freedom.
It is frightening to imagine South Sudan becoming another failed African story where the elite fight and squander an opportunity to uplift the state of the people.
Ever since South Sudan got independence the relationship between the two sides has been frosty; one side thought the other side was having its nose in the trough. No doubt, the whiff of corruption in the ranks of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement was thick as former rebels jostled for lucrative government contracts in a country with weak institutions.
The unimaginable opportunity for development and investment that South Sudan offered is going to waste as the politicians bicker. That its people remain poor is sad because the economic potential of south Sudan is huge, but remains largely untapped. It is agriculturally endowed with sugar and grain doing well; it has a huge plantation of teak and oil deposits too.
Kenya and other international parties, can and should pull its weight and persuade the warring parties to hammer out a deal that ensures a cessation of violence and a return to peace. They could start by convincing the warring parties to sit down and agree on a government of national unity as the factions figure out how to craft a new constitutional order that spells out a new order in which the military is first weaned off the past where they fought for separation from the North.
In the end, a chaotic South Sudan is not just good for Kenya, but to the rest of the world.
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